A look into the new movie “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse.” Image courtesy of CNN.
San Luis Obispo High School students, as well as some teachers, have taken an interest in the movie “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse,” and can’t wait to see the long-awaited sequel a whole five years later.
“Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” hit theaters across the globe in December of 2018 and changed animation forever. Its iconic style and strategies have been gazed upon by competitors and animation studios alike.
“I really like animation as well as the art side of it, and [“Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse”] is starting a new era in animation. If you look at a lot of animation or 3D animated movies that are coming out like “Puss In Boots” and [“Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem”], they are all in that sort of similar style that they started with the Spider-Verse movie,” said senior Molly Himelblau.
“Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” established its own animation style through lots of hard work from the animators at Sony’s Imageworks. Their goal was to replicate the style of a comic book, but in animation form, and the result was jaw-dropping.
“We wanted the film to have a hand-drawn look because one of the things that’s really beautiful and interesting about illustration is the freedom to draw what is most emotional and impactful without being constrained by realism or what is correct,” said VFX Supervisor for “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” Danny Dimian.
In order to replicate the “comic book look,” the animators even avoided certain strategies that have been a fundamental part of animation such as traditional lens blur in order to imitate depth of field/camera focus and soft gradations which were replaced by halftoning and line hatching.
“[Into the Spider-Verse] looked like a live-action comic book if that makes sense. It was cool, it was different, it was snazzy,” said 2023 SLOHS graduate Anthony Meinhold.
Traditionally animated films are animated on ones, meaning for every second there are 24 distinct frames, but the animators at Imageworks decided to animate in twos, where each image is held for two frames so that there were only 12 individual images for every second of the film. With animating on twos, it provides the replication of a comic book panel to where each frame appears as its own distinct image.
With the new movie, “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse,” students are hoping to see a continuation of this incredible style as well as a fun and intriguing story. Go see it out now!
Source: imageworks.com
