Animation Guild | We are 839 Digital Magazine
Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1079787
D E PA R T M E N T 45 KEYFRAME CONNECTING THE DOTS Screentones and the use of reflective light are another game-changer. The team had to work to get the computers to create unique light sources out of the dots that mimicked the familiar Ben-Day dots of comics, but those dots were must-haves, according to Thompson. "The value-added proposition to this movie is that you get to be inside a comic book," says Thompson. "So I needed characters to be able to walk through these dots and be affected by them. If there's a light source on screen, I needed it to actually interact with the character in an exact way. I wanted there to be one set of screentones for the highlights, one for the half tones and then another one for the shadows. If you look at the comics, that's actually how they do it." For the buildings that fill up Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the other three Boroughs, the film's software designers employed a device, which came to be known as the Magic Cube. The cube placed randomly-generated shape patterns in all of the windows, helping to give all of the structures a uniqueness. During a subsequent visit to New York, Thompson strolled around and noted how closely the Magic Cube patterns seemed to match what actually existed. SHADY CHARACTER Creating human skin tones to synch up with the graphic style of the film was a trial and error procedure that took a year to perfect. According to Thompson, having the characters integrate seamlessly into the graphic environment was a constant challenge and matching up the skin was especially difficult. Consider the villainous Kingpin, an enormous figure whose head and hands seem to be in different planes from his body. Thompson envisioned the character as a nod to the Kingpin rendered in Bill Sienkiewicz's "Daredevil" comics. Where most of the other characters were chiseled or otherwise well-defined, Kingpin was largely defined by his girth. But the character had to be able to emote, not come off as what Smith calls "a huge slab of meat." "You wanted to feel that he wasn't a blobby character, but a character of mass and structure," says Smith, who worked extensively on the character with Thompson. "Once again, you're working with all of these awesome shapes, and you know that visual development is going to come in and really determine how the lights will react with all of these folds and wrinkles." Thompson conceived him as a vast silhouette and wanted to figure out a way that the character could appear to reject all sense of space. The artists ended up rigging the character's head, hands and body separately and hiding the points of detachment. Considering that the character would engage in an effects-laden battle with Miles at the film's culmination, Kingpin had to be visually strong. "It has to feel like the character has volume, but you can't actually sense the volume, just have a black silhouette with hands and head that sort of float around," says Thompson. "Nobody was sure it was going to work, and neither was I, but that was like the theme of filmmaking the entire time." opposite, from top: Miles Morales, Peter Parker and Spider-Gwen; Kingpin and Miles' epic battle; Peter Parker. above: Concept art and sketches for Miles Morales. SPRING 2019 45