ANIMATION
DIVERSITY REIGNS SUPREME IN SPIDER-MAN: ACROSS THE SPIDER-VERSE By TREVOR HOGG
Images courtesy of Sony Pictures Animation. TOP: One of the most difficult tasks was to slightly age Miles Morales and Gwen Stacy without them appearing unfamiliar. OPPOSITE TOP TO BOTTOM: Concept art of the adversary known as the Spot, who is made of paint, ink, and has the ability to dissolve worlds into nothingness. Medieval Vulture, inspired by the drawings of Leonardo Da Vinci and made of sepia-toned paper, turned out to be the most complicated character to execute. Taking part in the battle at the Guggenheim is the motorcycle-driving and pregnant Jessica Drew/SpiderWoman and anti-hero Miguel O’Hara/Spider-Man 2099.
Much like The Matrix, which caused a ripple through the film industry because of innovative storytelling, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse had the same impact, with its creative influence going beyond its Oscar win for Best Animated Feature to inspire several imitations. Upping the ante is the first of two proposed sequels, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, by showcasing not only the world inhabited by a slightly older Miles Morales but those serving as the homes of Spider-Gwen, Spider-Man 2099 and Spider-Man: India. And let’s not forget that the cast of Spider-People has been multiplied by 10, and Miles finds himself clashing with them on how to handle the portal-empowered villain known as the Spot. To handle the expanding multimedia aesthetic of the franchise, Sony Pictures Imageworks created a new department called Look of Picture. “On this one, there are so many technical hurdles and different looks that I’ve spent 80% of my time developing tools,” states Bret St. Clair, Senior Look Development and Lighting TD at Sony Pictures Imageworks. “We saw a lot of art that depicted paint being thrown around in-frame in ways where strokes aren’t specifically connected to a character or to anything. They’re floating in space. The problem for us is we try to approach everything rendering in a traditional way. Then we try to have all of our tools handle the rest in compositing. When it comes to positioning brushes in 3D, we needed to be able to reconstruct where those positions are, even when they don’t lie specifically on the surface that you’re apply the brush to, and the rendering tools, especially in 2D, don’t give you that information for free.” Watercolor was the media of choice for Spider-Gwen’s world. “A lot of the look early on was inspired by the Jason Latour art, and everything was running vertically in that world,” St. Clair remarks. “As you start to move cameras around and we started to get through shots, it became clear we can’t have everything running
64 • VFXVOICE.COM SUMMER 2023
PG 64-70 SPIDER-VERSE.indd 64
5/1/23 3:01 PM