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www.postmagazine.com 18 POST MAR/APR 2024 and Sony Pictures Imageworks. They're technically two separate entities, but we really work as one unit. That shorthand — they've worked on so many films together, going back to Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs — that handoff is like speaking a language without words. They have a way of interpreting our emotionality and our lack of technical know-how into what tools will need to get built in order to achieve the things that we're asking for, for every world. "In Gwen's world, in particular, those scenes were built uniquely. Gwen's world doesn't obey one light source, so you have new setups for all those scenes. They were willing to go into battle for those ideas every single time." How did you launch your career, and what was your path to directing an animated feature? "I was sort of the world's worst student. I don't rec- ommend this path. I was much like Miles. I graduated high school with a bunch of my friends, and a lot of them started going off to college. I, from a very young age, knew I wanted to do something artistic. I grew up in LA, so my high school was right down the street from Film Roman, where they were making The Simpsons. I'd walk home from school and literally watch the animators designing The Simpsons right there. So I was really lucky in that it was around me. I could see it — it felt tangible. But breaking that barri- er and just getting in seemed almost insurmountable. The luck of growing up in the area is that all the peo- ple that worked at those studios at night basically got together and said, 'Hey, we need to teach a new generation of artists.' They got together and they formed a little technical school. It was unaccredited, but it taught you from the people that were making the films during the day. "I was literally slinging coffee at the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, and at night, going and taking these courses at the school. I found storyboarding. I love comic books, I love animation, I love film. And when I took my first storyboarding class, I realized this was like a combination of all these things — where you're telling a story, you're speaking through a camera lens. You're really setting a pace. My teacher at the time, he said to the class, 'What you don't realize is that the story artist is kind of the director at the top.' It's like you're really dictating a pace that the director will then internalize and make deci- sions on that. You really get to set a pace, and that seemed exciting. So my path was a story artist. That was sort of a direct shot to directing, to producing and then onto directing a feature film. "I was one of those kids that my mom thought, 'Is there something wrong with you because you're in your room all day drawing?' I wouldn't go outside. If you really have a passion for something, you will find a way to make it part of your life, even if it's just a hobby. If I'm not drawing for work, I'm drawing because I enjoy drawing." What advice do you wish you had known when you first started out? "To appreciate the process. Not to worry so much about what's around the corner, but to really appreciate and do the very best at what's right in front of you. When you're younger, you're always thinking, 'What's my next move? What's going to be the next thing that's going to get me to the thing?' And I think what I realized, and I was for- tunate enough to realize really soon, is that it's the work that's directly in front of you that's going to speak on your behalf and get you to the exit." VFX SUPERVISOR MICHAEL LASKER How did you approach the challenge of supervising the film's multitude of effects? "There's a lot. I think there's more in this movie than any movie I've ever seen. I did the first movie Into the Spider-Verse, and it kind of rewired our brains to get used to having to figure out how to do ev- ery form of filmmaking and rediscover it. And then after Mitchells vs. the Machines, I rolled onto this movie. It's not like everything's thrown on you all at once. You know the story. You know the script. Little by little you find things out. But very quickly we realized we have six universes to build. "We worked with the art department and the directors, and we figured out what we'd have to develop and what the different looks would be. We built tools in the end that we could actually use across all the universes, but just dialed differently. So for outlines in 2099 and outlines in India, we were using the same tools, but just dialed them to look like different styles. But it was a lot of work. We used to joke that a day on Spider-Verse is like a week. If you were out for a day, you're like, 'Oh my God, what did I miss?' It's insane. But we had like a thousand artists. It was like driving a ship through the ocean on a journey. We have very organized people. We have very talented people. Everyone's in it together, just figuring out how to make this art. It really unleashed everyone's artistry and people got really into it. That passion just drove it." Across the Spider-Verse also refers to the pipeline that was running through the whole project? "Oh, big time. I mean, we developed brand-new tools from the ground up, and we would have meetings about the Vulture or about Spider-Byte, where every part of the pipeline was involved. So we would need the riggers and the modelers and effects and CFX [character effects] all talking about how are we were going to make this charac- ter, but it got everyone together on the same page. So I would just love having meetings where the whole pipeline was represented. You want to do things the best way for everybody. Usually there's someone who's not crazy about it, but you can't make everyone happy." How did you keep that communication going with your teams all over the world? "We're based in Vancouver. We have a core team in Artists were encouraged to share their ideas. Miles' story was designed to be both relatable and supernatural.