Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse: The Art of the Movie

Product Information

Aritst Kristafter Anka is credited with this Spider-Man 2099 suit design, but according to a visual development artist who worked on Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse, Jake Panian, he states: Please allow me to explain about my mysterious roll in Sony´s “ In to the spiderverse” film as a "Visual Consultant" Here’s how just one of the film’s scenes evolved from initial sketch to fully realised concept art, as Miles ( voiced by Shameik Moore) heads underground with his uncle Aaron (Mahershala Ali) to practice his street art – and ends up the unwitting victim of a fateful spider bite… Chain reaction

Im really happy to see that most of my shots on this early boards made it to the final film. Again I would like to congratulate the whole team that finished the final film for preserving the compositions and the original intention of these shots. It shows that everyone felt inspired and that they really cared for this particular vision. Gaming Let expert reviewers guide you on which games to play. From consoles to RPGS and shooters, we’ve got it all here just waiting for you to read. These costumes are all pretty amazing in very different ways, though we'd say the design which was ultimately chosen is by far the best one. In a comic book, there’s no lens. So there’s no lens blur. To stay true to the medium, we decided to go with a CMYK offsetting as our blur. The film actually has no motion blur in it, but, instead, borrows from certain anime techniques to replicate the feeling of motion with a frame. At first it was a real problem because you’d get a lot of [visual] chatter. Despite our best intentions, you still need a “lens” that can focus. So we decided, all the [sense of] focus is done with a CMYK offsetting like you’d get off a four-pass printing press. Then we were bringing in the halftones, because that’s old school comic book DNA, as well, where you would have these halftone patterns that you’d rub on that would become your grades. Our lighting is actually rendering in these halftones. It was a major undertaking by our incredible team at Imagework, who deserve all the praise in the world for their hard work.I want to congratulate absolutely everybody, my original team and the huge amount of artist that came after. Everybody, Artist, Producers and Technicians. My original vision for sure could had been a different film. Worst film or better film, thats not important. A film, same a life, has many possible futures. The movie in fact talks about dimensions. Thats very much my point. The film I imagined happily lives in another dimension. I work with pencil, photoshop, I do the comp in After FX and my edits in Premiere, with my own sounds and all bunch of crap in Audition... Did I ever say how much I love adobe? Were there any kill-your-darlings moments, certain directions or design choices along the way that you ultimately moved on from, but you still think fondly on?

Then there’s Pavitr Prabhakar, aka Spider-Man India. The very first teaser for Across the Spider-Verse had a brief glimpse of the character’s world but now we know for sure he’s going to be in there. No word on who will provide the voice, but here’s his awesome, unique look. Image: Sony Pictures As you can see the 3 versions are very different in tone. It was early and I was not too sure yet what would be the final mood of this film yet. Sorry I was long. I just wanted to explain about this weird Visual Consultant credit that I ended up having in the film. People keep asking.In the upgrade of Miles from a young teen to an older teen, his growing up a little was one of those where when the new shapes came into play, we handled it wrong; he no longer looked like himself,” Hawkins reveals. “Miles has a particular cheekbone structure and eye-corner shaping; his silhouette from the side and the way his mouth in the first movie had a bit of an overbite, and as they aged him up a little bit, you want to give someone a more pronounced jawline. That stuff did affect the way Miles looked, and he became a little unfamiliar. We had to make adjustments to how the rig would behave and how we handled the posing to make him look like a grownup version of that same Miles everybody loves.” After almost 2 years ( or year and 1/2 ) I guess Sony and me didnt get along that well and I was fired . Where the decision came from or where it was initiated is still a mystery. This was very much a painful surprise for me and my team and many others. We had mostly technical and style discrepancies but I didn't know they were so major. The way I wanted to do things and the way Sony wanted to do things, at least at the time, were different. Something that either accidentally or on purpose I always want to do in my projects is to brake the repetitive and very succesful “look” and pipeline that all the big Giants Corps in animation had been smashing in our faces for the last decade, up to a point that is dificult to diferenciate who did what.

The movie stars Shameik Moore, Hailee Steinfeld, Jake Johnson, Issa Rae, Daniel Kaluuya, Karan Soni, Jason Schwartzman, Brian Tyree Henry, Luna Lauren Velez, Greta Lee, Rachel Dratch, Jorma Taccone, Shea Whigham, and Oscar Isaac. Yeah, and [the design] is what it had to be, if we wanted to celebrate Miles the way we did. It gave us an opportunity to not only create these other universes, but then to show how each one is unique and special unto itself. It really comes from a love within the crew for all these different styles. For Ham, it was very much an homage and celebration [of things like] Pigs is Pigs (WB, 1937), and classical animation. I got to do a lot of the noir stuff, and I was pulling from a lot of John Paul Leon, heavy ink comic books. SP//dr is very Kill la Kill. Our crew — and especially our production designer, Justin K. Thompson — are the biggest art nerds in the world. They would get so excited about taking the look there. Thankfully, [producers] Phil Lord, Chris Miller, and [directors] Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, Rodney Rothman are all these talented creatives that say, “Oh, we have to do it! We have to take advantage of this opportunity!”

Our mantra throughout the film was ‘make this read like a comic book.’ If the set needs to be moved, if the focal length needs to be changed, if character staging needs to break, that’s fine. At the end of the day, it was all about paying homage to classic comic book design language. 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 applying the brush to, and the rendering tools, especially in 2D, don’t give you that information for free.” Oh, and that big “visual development” on each piece of art should make it clear but these are not final images. But the fact that these three characters are not in the new trailer, a trailer absolutely filled with Spider-People, speaks to just how many are going to be in the new movie.