Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse

Ever since the first trailer for ‘Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse’ dropped fans knew that we were in for something special. The new animation style which was created for the film truly feels like a comic book has been brought to life. Now, directors Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, and Rodney Rothman as well as producers Chris Miller and Phil Lord have started to open up about how the film is also a technical masterpiece.

In a recent interview with /Film, the directors behind the film discussed what went on in production to make this movie unique among animated and superhero films.

When talking about how they created the style, Persichetti shared:

“Oddly enough, we struggle to trying to simplify it. At its core, we took the idea of traditional hand-drawn animation and the rules of that, and then took CG animation and blended them together. That’s the super simple version of it. A little deeper in the weeds is that we had these characters modeled based off of drawings, and then once we did that, we realized some of the really expressive parts of the designs were actually the line work. We went in and figured out a way to draw line work on top of these characters three-dimensionally, and then that line work could accept light if it needed to, or not.
Then the final thing that really makes it feel a lot different is, there’s 24 frames a second in film, and in all CGI right now, there’s a new image for every frame of movement. In traditional hand-drawn animation, you only needed twelve drawings to fill it up because your eye can’t catch that little – you can hold a drawing for two frames, but if you hold a drawing for three, your eye can kind of catch the fact that it’s being held. So we stripped out everything, we animated this on twos, and they had to write a bunch of new algorithms and things to try to make up for the lost simulations of all that stuff, like hair and cloth. But it really just makes it feel crunchy and crispy and –”

Ramsey jumped in to describe it as “poppier,” which is exactly what the trailers have given us so far.

Persichetti continued:

“And then the final little reason why it’s so crisp is that there’s not one frame of motion blur anywhere in the movie. That’s in every movie now. Even live-action with CG VFX, they put motion blur on it because it just helps soften it, and we were just looking for something that felt a little more punchy.”

However, to do this, it is being reported that the movie took up to four times longer than an animated film of the same length would typically take.

Collider also sat down with Phil Lord and Chris Miller recently who gave a few additional details in the following video:

I think Sony Pictures made the right decision with this one. While they will likely still make the mistake of trying to create live-action takes on the character, I have to believe that if they went down the route of trying to create an animated cinematic Spider-Man world based on this technology that they’d be better off – and so would we.

Are you excited for the release of ‘Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse’? Do you agree that Sony Pictures should quit trying to give us live-action versions of these characters and just stick with animation? Share your thoughts in the comments below, True Believers!

‘Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse’ will be swinging into your local theater on December 14th, 2018.