How Animators Created the Spider-Verse | WIRED

remember different let's go is what makes you spider-man my name is Danny Demian I'm the visual effects supervisor and I'm Joshua beverage I was head of character animation on spider-man into the spider verse my name is Peter Parker I'm pretty sure you know the rest when we started the film we really didn't know what we wanted the film to look like we did know what our inspiration was we all loved comic books and we went back and we looked at a comic books to see what was special about them we fell in love with the halftone 2 hatching and the line work we were really inspired by Jack Kirby's illustrations he has the kirby crackle or kirby dots that he uses a lot you'll see man Johnson's motif through the entire movie and a lot of the techniques or visuals that came from how the comic books were printed we wanted to stay away from anything that was soft or did not look like it belongs in the illustrated world that included motion blur that includes the camera focus so one of the great things about this movie because it all feels like it's printed in community could stop on absolutely every frame and it's all clear you can understand where it's coming from and going to it looks like an illustration on every frozen frame this very first shot of miles I love because we got to do this one at the very very end of the movie we did that one specifically so late because the song was being written of while we were making it so we actually started animating before the song he's seeing to was finished [Music] motif wise the goal for this this scene is seen is to make me feel as like in his element as possible but he's in his neighborhood he loved this place and he's comfortable there it's a very inviting place so the palette the lighting it's a comfortable safe space and this is this starts to get contrasted as we go to the school where the lighting starts to get a little harsher and we we kind of leave some of the comfort of of his environment New York is an iconic part of the movie yeah and we'd really drilled into trying to treat New York the way only animation can treat it like it's a character and not just the whole city of New York but the borough's itself we treated like different characters Manhattan was this exaggeration of scale and license brightness the shot where our miles is leaping off the building I thought it is miles a leap of faith it has an illustrated feel to it and it starts with these models stood on their own kind of look broken all the buildings are portions that don't make sense for a New York and there's cute in a way deliver miles they were yeah you have buildings that were maybe eight to ten times taller than they should be for our new yorking shots they're also weirdly compulsive it's when you see it from the shot camera it all looks really I mean it looks really cool you pull from the side and you view it through a witness camera you can see that not only are the building very strange proportions but the layout is really messed up it's it's really weird broken looking but from the camera it's it's an amazingly powerful shot what you're seeing here is a test environment some people might look at the Train some people might look at miles you're seeing the color shift in and out of registration the way that the colors might be misprinted if they weren't lined up properly so it definitely puts one area in focus but the same time it still avoids that that lens feel or the softness so this sequences we called sitting back there it's really the first time we see Myles and his dad really interacting in the movie that first shot of this run where they're rounding the corner in front of that TV screen is a great example of offsetting the characters in the foreground so you can pay attention to the screen in focus this one test shot one of the key things we really discovered from it was how much we could deconstruct level of detail at a distance if you look really closely all of the traffic in this image behind that one passing lane is all just simple color blobs and the simple color blobs represent a full city and it was a great aha moment for the entire team that we were going to populate it with a thousand cars and full of every single light in there we took that idea and we applied it to a lot in the movie including every interior and it's a great example of handling level of detail in a way we hadn't traditionally I didn't have to have the team animate hundreds and hundreds of cars and characters and write populate every building with people and just get that reduced later it was color blob and then we were looking for opportunities to make things simpler in animation all throughout the movie sometimes like even we'd have characters holding flashlights and if you didn't see them we didn't animate them that concept became an that starting ground for another test if you notice really closely on the bus that's crossing the scene it's actually just a deconstructed painting there's not forty characters all sitting within that bus we're also introducing pop frames in it where it's just hand-drawn and it's it's really simple and it could be basically it's taken out of a simple comic we're starting to realize that we have an opportunity here to create a new visual language line work is one of those things we had to solve a lot of different ways it's amazing how much one little line for a furrow or a dimple can make you feel completely different about the expression form lines describe the shape of something I think like a nose the effects team did this amazing thing where we had the character designer make a library of drawings so that was something we could make rules for this is the way that nose would look from this head angle to camera and we made it a whole bunch of poses that defined that an effects team would recreate those in 3d space with those rules of head angle to camera and then let the machine learning program try and guess where those drawings would go and a person would correct it every time it was wrong making it therefore another rule and little by little we're teaching the computer to make drawings that we find redundant so like a example like where miles is scrunching is faced right there usually the characters like this you'd have to be wrinkling the model in order to get this sort of creasing I would never be as satisfying as a simple stroke you can just have the stroke on top of it and it's far more expressive and we understand it it's more clear all that technology was in the service of allowing artists more freedom to do things by hand and it all all became a part of this hand crafted feel how the saying goes early on we realized that animating on twos was gonna be a great solution for a couple of reasons if you just watch it at speed your ears immersed in the movie you're not noticing all these things are really sneakily hidden in there but if you pause and flow down the same footage and you'll see only every other frame while this animated that's what we're describing as on twos you get that nice crispness that pop art feel we're looking for almost every shot in the movie the cameras are on once so we had to come up with all kinds of different technical solutions for how to make our performances with our characters on to work with different styles of camera always on ones so if we just look at one scene for the movie this one of miles running through the forest you can see he's going in and out of sync with the camera if the camera is moving at high speed through this handheld ones through an entire forest but Peter and miles they're both usually animated on twos but we're going in and out of sync with them just so you're getting that sort of feeling of they're not quite on the same page the real goal of this section is to make miles feel like he's getting it miles is not quite in his element he hasn't learned to be a hero yet he hasn't figured out how to well in web-swing he starts really out of sync with Peter Peter being in his and his mastery and at this being his comfort zone isn't a big deal for him so the beautiful thing about this sequence is we're literally seeing the two of them get on the same page they start more out of sync and little by little get into sync with each other and they're even on different frame rates until they both get it together and because it's on Tues we'd clarify that sort of posing and flipping Peter doing the iconic low center of gravity Spidey poses and miles little by little gets to get there by the end of it and then you see them make eye contact and bond over that experience and then you can see Peter glitch here he's not supposed to be in this spider-verse and so all the all the superheroes that come to this spider-verse from theirs they struggle with this dimensional glitching hey guys okay who are you i'm gwen stacy so we had to bring in each of the spider people from different universes and making this different as possible while still standing next to each other and looking like they looked good next to each other there was the perfect handsome Spidey the goal with him was how perfect of a hero could we make him the hood was gonna be a great role model for miles and then take him away and we'll replace him with Peter be Parker or burrito Peter this is your universe soggy it's weird it's gross he's no longer in his prime because maybe she'd be retired by now it's one of the few more fights he's lost a lot more fights he he's a reluctant man sorry you have money right I'm not very liquid right now I think you're gonna be a bad teacher there's Gwen Stacy actually Gwen Stacy is of all of the spider people the hero prime she is the most capable and adept and in charge but she's also probably had the most recent trauma so she has a little bit more than fighter noir hey fellas he looks black and white even in our world he never does get any collar he has the best one-liners wherever I go the wind follows the wind smells like rain penny Parker Annie Parker was the only spider person that doesn't have superpowers of her own and she is has a mental telekinetic relationship with the spider that runs her robot named SPDR that her father created spider-ham wacky spider-man yeah he's the most - we were trying to be you know cartoonists that I could merely trying to make him feel as hand-wrought as possible he's got a giant hammer that he pulled in his pocket yep my name is Peter Parker characters like miles Peter and Gwen they all came from the same physical universe we're like the laws of reality or all somewhat similar and more extreme characters like ham and war and especially penny Parker we got to push them back how differently could we make them the final battle the wheels fall off we've turned everything to 11 everything is going nuts so we have this abstract world kind of inspired by Kirby dots the Kirby dots are not just an aesthetic thing their nod to the collider beam which which is a particle beam and depending on what's happening in which characters are important the palette is shifting based on the colors and the worlds of or the spider-verse colors of those characters and then when when you get to the most emotional part where it's just miles in and kingpin and you know this is this is the final moments of the final battle we lose all color it's black the Kirby dots are now just volumes of nothing them yeah enveloping them and it becomes really just about them and it also sets up incredibly beautifully the contrast of when miles finally uses his super power with the touch [Applause] you've now established this black background for this beautiful strike of his [Music] this was a special project there's not very many times where you really get to do something new it had to be bold it had to be different and I was Adam and the audience put on us before we even started really everybody held hands from the very beginning to try to do something special and to try to push animation somewhere where or hadn't been different [Music]

Channel: WIRED

Views: 3,647,917

Rating: 4.982502 out of 5

Keywords: 2018 academy awards, academy awards, academy awards 2018, design fx, spiderman, spider-man: into the spider-verse, spider-man, into the spider verse, into the spider verse visual effects, effects, cg, visuals, spider-man: into the spider-verse visuals, spider-man: into the spider-verse visual effects, spider-man: into the spider-verse art style, spider-man: into the spider-verse art, marvel, marvel spider man, marvel movies, marvel special effects, special effects, wired

Id: l-wUKu_V2Lk

Length: 13min 28sec (808 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 22 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/duhvorced]

Really cool seeing some of the thought processes that went into the movie.

I’m not a comic fanboy by any means - I don’t know a lot about the history or art-form - but seems pretty obvious this movie will be seen by future generations as an important milestone in the genre.

[u/rattleandhum]

A pity they totally left out the enormous contribution Alberto Mielgo had at the inception of the project -- almost the entire movie is based on his 'look'

[u/kingbrasky]

Cool to see how it came together and some of the tricks used to make it do-able at scale. The first time I watched the movie I thought it had to have taken hundreds of thousands of man-hours to put together.

Just an insane spectacle of a movie.

[u/deRoyLight]

That scene where he's falling is one of the best movie moments I've ever seen. Especially in context of what it means in the film.

[u/Hieillua]

Just watched it last night and I'm still blown away by it. I didn't buy the hype around it at all and didn't give it much attention after just watching its first trailer. I also didn't want to spoil myself so I ignored all posts about it on Reddit and all videos about it on Youtube. I only knew a lot of people were hyped about it.

So I finally watched it last night and I just can't get over what kind of amazing love letter to Spider-Man it was. Never seen a comicbook movie like this. A comicbook movie that just celebrates everything the character it's based upon. It really is a love letter.

[u/dnteatyellwsnw]

I did love the grainy spotted style throughout the film

[u/Luke5119]

What sold me in the first 5 mins. was how Sony didn't fear from poking fun at themselves for Spider-Man 3 and Chris Pine as the "original" Spider-Man reminded me a great deal of Deadpool for some reason in how he talked and delivered his lines. A movie I thought for sure would suck, turned out to be pretty awesome.

[u/no_myth]

So interesting how they used ML to do the line work. One of the things that really gave the animation its humanity was somehow handled by an algorithm.

[u/FunkSoulPower]

This movie is an absolute achievement of design, for many many reasons. I'm a 41 year old dude and really burned out on banal MCU/DCU movies, and in fact was never a huge fan of them. I liked them and I've seen them all, but I also don't really care about them. I loved Spiderverse.