Animation Guild | We are 839 Digital Magazine
Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1535742
Sony Pictures Animation's Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse was an industry game-changer, combining 3D with 2D that included classic comic book styling. TURNING THE PAGE "Make something I've never seen before," recalls Justin K. Thompson, the Production Designer on Sony Pictures Animation's Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018). "That's all anybody ever said to me." And that's exactly what the film's team achieved—setting a bold course for future animated films by the way it integrated hand-drawn 2D techniques with 3D rendering technology. 2D and 3D had met in animated films before, but Spider-Verse used innovative advances in processing technology that were developed for the film. While most CG movies by this time were focused on more photorealistic depictions, Spider- Verse went its own way. To achieve a blend of different comic stylings—30's pulp, Mad magazine, manga, and various eras from the Marvel pantheon—the filmmakers revised CG images via an overlay of hand- drawn art, using software that allowed artists to introduce linework, hatching, motion blurs, and comic-style halftone textures directly into a 3D space. The resulting collision of 2D and 3D was every bit as momentous as the collider discovered by the film's antagonist, Kingpin, that opened up portals to alternate universes. In the film's climactic scene, as the main characters swirl around in a jaw-dropping final battle, the filmmakers tested how much the audience's senses could take. "[But] the real trick of all these stylized films is not letting the stylization overpower the story and the emotion you're trying to put into it. Whenever [that happened], we would pull back," Thompson says. "[What] I think we learned, between Into the Spider-Verse and Across the Spider-Verse [2023], was that the audience's tolerance was way higher than we thought." © 2023 Sony Pictures Animation Inc. All Rights Reserved. | MARVEL and all related character names: © & ™ 2023 MARVEL. SUMMER 2025 43