Hello, everyone.
This is Phil Lord,
a co-writer and producer of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.
I'm Chris Miller, producer.
I am Bob Persichetti, uh, one of the directors.
This is Peter Ramsey, another one of the directors.
This is Rodney Rothman. I'm a co-director and co-writer.
- And cohort. - And cohort.
- And sweetheart. - I like take one better.
Really?
- I think this one was good. - Marvel.
You're currently watching the, uh, opening credits,
all glitching from various universes.
Sony Pictures Animation brings this lovely film to you. Whoo-hoo.
See a Miles sticker on that logo.
Already putting his stamp on the movie.
There was a Columbia logo from Cat Ballou,
a fine film if you haven't ever seen it.
A universe where Cat Ballou is the main...
Sony logo?
And we are approved by the Comics Code Authority.
The Comics Code, for those who don't know,
was a censorship board in the early days of comics,
when they were worried about comics poisoning the minds of children.
Why'd you tell 'em, man?
We also saw a 42 on a ping-pong ball.
- Yes. - That was...
A reference to Miles's origin
and, uh, the fact that he got to go to his school
because he won a lottery.
I'm pretty sure you know the rest.
With great power comes great responsibility.
There's the line.
- That is the OG Uncle Ben. - Yep.
You may notice a bunch of scenes
that are reminiscent of other iconic Spider-Man moments.
This version of Peter was supposed to be an amalgam
of all the Spider-Men that we knew in the universe,
good and bad.
- Bad? - And great.
Good and great. I'm sorry.
Good and great.
Yes.
That joke saved the movie.
The dance move or the popsicle?
- The dance move. - The joke started the movie.
I resisted that dance joke,
and Rodney really pushed hard for it.
- He was right. - He was right.
I would've been happy if we came up with something better.
That's impossible.
- We did try. - It told the audience
what movie they were watching, that they were watching a comedy.
And they laughed so big.
And, uh, they laughed at everything afterwards, as a result.
I call that a warm-up laugh, Phil.
Oh, nicely done.
- Warm the audience up for... - That's a professional term.
For Miles not knowing the words to this song,
this original song.
Another Rodney Rothman thought.
Yeah, we all wanted to meet Miles in a very intimate place,
and it was Rodney who was really pushing to, uh, have him be in this relatable idea
of not knowing all the lyrics to a song but singing along privately
so you could fall in love with this guy.
And this shot took how long to animate, Bob?
Oh, boy.
Um, weeks and weeks and weeks.
We started animating it before we actually had the song finished,
which, um, was interesting.
It was really easy to not know the words then.
I mean, it's a really long shot
with a lot of intimate, nuanced animation in it, so...
- Yeah. - Amazing animators.
And there's actually three straight, very long...
Well, more or less three straight, very long shots of Miles that introduce him.
One's about to start right now, but... that was a choice,
a deliberate choice, I think, to open with a big, crazy Spider-Man montage,
and then when we meet Miles,
kind of start a different pace and, uh, long shots
and just kind of watch him and how he is and don't get too fancy with it.
Although, ironically, these shots are very fancy.
I mean, they literally immerse you in his world,
which is really cool.
And you get to spend time with him and see him in a more naturalistic way.
Everything from the color to the shot language to the sound design
is meant to go from a very heightened experience with Peter
to a very naturalistic experience with Miles.
This scene in particular showcases the great dynamic
that Brian Tyree Henry, who plays Miles's dad,
and Shameik Moore, who plays Miles, have.
And... I think it's a really beautiful scene
and it's a really, it's a really important scene for the whole movie.
Yeah, this was the scene
that really set the tone for their relationship.
When we recorded it we were in Atlanta,
and we had the two of them together and it was, um...
I think Brian may have even actually been
a little bit annoyed at Shameik a couple of times.
And I think you can feel it in here, in a really wonderful way.
And then the animators...
This was like the one where we really...
I think all of us saw the animation coming back
and we realized that this movie had something special
with, like, the naturalism in the performances
and the relationship dynamics.
We also recorded them together sitting in chairs set up like a car.
So, Brian was in front, and Shameik was in back, and they had microphones set up,
and they kinda could just perform the scene over and over again
as if they were in an imaginary car.
The art team had...
They'd give like 50 Foam Party logo options.
Just like 17 rounds to get the actual right logo for Foam Party.
Good use of resources.
It's important that we get that accurate and right
for just the level of bougie-ness.
It's a pretty good name for a trendy coffee shop.
It is.
If this doesn't work out, we're all going into business together.
- We'll take over Brooklyn. - Could it be like Magic Mike,
where we just open up a Foam Party in Las Vegas and just, uh...
- Of course. - Dubai.
It doesn't feel like I have a choice right now.
You don't!
- Uncomfortable moment. - We're just watching the movie.
- I know, we got lost in it. - I got sucked into the movie.
One thing, this is where you can...
We could talk for a second about the chromatic aberration,
or color separation, that's happening in a lot of these shots
for depth of field,
where things that are in focus are clear, but things in back aren't blurry.
They have, like, a printing process,
like a four-color printing process color separation
that indicates where you're supposed to look.
So sometimes it looks like you're watching a 3-D movie without the glasses on.
- Um... - That was on purpose.
Yes, but once you get used to it,
you feel the sense that, really,
every frame is supposed to feel like it is a piece of printed art.
Here's the second of three, kind of, oners
of Miles in his element, or not.
Yeah, that was one meant to really, um, call back
to the one where he was passing his old school
and just to sort of set the two apart in a really distinct way.
And you can see the colors and the camerawork,
everything is really different than what he was experiencing
on the streets of Brooklyn, so it's a...
This poor kid is tossed into a whole different fish tank.
There's a... On the cover of Great Expectations,
there's an image of Pip getting a...
- What's the old guy in Great Expectations? - Magwitch.
Magwitch grabbing Pip's shoulder in a cemetery from Great Expectations--
- Foreshadowing. - Technically foreshadowing.
Oh, look down there. "Dr. Olivia O."
- Hmm. Interesting. - Dr. Olivia O. Yes.
Good hiding the ball, everybody.
And smiley kid, it was in every frame smiling weird.
Because it's not a real person,
I think we can say that our least-favorite extra is smiley.
Unless somebody disagrees, unless somebody...
- I think he's... - He's somebody's favorite.
Yeah, I think he comes around, you know?
He's great, then he's bad, and then he's great again.
Right, right, right.
He's like the extra in a live-action movie
who worms his way to the front of every shot.
And he almost looks into the camera.
I wish we had extras looking in camera.
I would've really appreciated that.
Zero. Oh, this little scene came in late.
Early and late.
Early, and we cut it, and then we put it back in.
On a true-or-false quiz at random,
do you know what score they would get?
- 50%? - That's right!
The only way to get all the answers wrong is to know which answers are right.
You're trying to quit.
And I'm not gonna let you.
That expression there was ripped off of, um, President Barack Obama.
Just so you know, in case you were wondering.
I love it.
There is a rice cooker in the back
because Miles's roommate, Ganke, is Korean-American.
I don't think we're gonna win
the "inventive metaphors of the year" award for this movie.
I think, I would say subtle...
- Maybe inventive. Maybe not subtle. - Maybe not subtle.
Can I just call out Benson Avenue...
where my father grew up in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn.
So, I was trying to get a little nod to that.
And Biggie Smalls in an animated Spider-Man movie.
What universe? I mean, it's kind of crazy.
This is the ideal timeline that we're living in.
That changed, uh, people's perception of the movie.
Absolutely.
When we had this in, it really, like, lit people up.
Uh-oh. What's that? Easter egg.
There's a Donald Glover Easter egg there
for those that may have missed it.
And before that we saw on, uh, Miles's phone...
I'm sorry, on Aaron's phone,
an old photo of him and Jeff when they were young,
which is a Bob Persichetti add that, um, that we all really like
'cause it, uh, it gives you some sense of the history between Aaron and Jeff.
Yeah.
That popcorn's hot. Watch out, Aaron.
You hear the great Mahershala Ali in action.
- Yeah. No one smoother. - His voice...
I mean, I feel like the shoulder touch would work
if your voice sounds like Mahershala's.
Pretty sure if Mahershala did that, it would work.
Yeah. It'd be, "Okay, let's do this thing."
Yeah.
We were all in awe of Mahershala Ali.
And every time we recorded with him, um, was a fantastic moment.
Yeah.
He makes you want to be a better person when you're around him.
He does.
He's got a high bar.
Then he goes away, and it kind of wears off.
I mean, I think he just brought legitimacy to Aaron in such a way.
Like all this stuff that could have maybe not felt so authentic
if it wasn't performed the way it was with sort of the deep, um, commitment
and just sensitivity to the performance and the subtlety that he brought.
I mean, he... he's, um, incredible.
And it deepens, you know, what happens later.
Exactly.
It deepens that because he brings such a... reality and a truth
to how he deals with Miles.
I mean, he's just in the moment with that relationship.
We're about to start a sequence that I would say, Bob,
you shepherded quite a bit.
Uh, I did, I did.
But you know, I mean, we all, like, you know, I think we all believed in it.
But I ended up getting, um, a little extra time on it, which was fun.
I mean, again, like, you know, Peter just said,
like, how do you have an animated film with Biggie in it?
And then how do you then get to go into a subway tunnel
and do a spray-painting time-lapse sequence
with a bunch of amazing, you know, sort of classic hip-hop songs
that you get to, um, remix and scratch.
It was like a fantasy.
This is basically unchanged for the last year,
other than trying to get the music dialed in.
- Yeah. - Yeah.
And also the fun of the spider, you know,
the spider constantly being around.
- Mm-hmm. - I would say this sequence...
I'm sorry, Chris. I'd say this sequence was kind of, like, a bit of a lodestar,
I'll use that expression for it, you know, from the last year forward,
as we figured out other parts of the movie,
just the fact that this part already existed and, uh, looked so cool
and said so much stuff about Miles and his, uh, creativity
and his relationship with his uncle, uh,
you know, the fact that we already had this
I think kind of emboldened us in other areas.
And that the movie is a remix of the Spider-Man.
- Yeah. - Exactly, exactly.
There's a whole deeper past, uh, between Jeff and Aaron
that's sort of only hinted at in this movie.
Uh, it was part of the reason why Miles's name isn't his father's last name,
not only that he'd be named Miles Davis, which would be embarrassing for anyone.
That'd be cool.
If you wanna learn more, look at the comics.
I mean, I think that we kind of treated the comics and the backstory there
as more or less what the backstory was.
Yeah, definitely.
But I always loved how Aaron brought Miles down here
and you find out, "Oh, that's what he and Jeff used to do."
And the age difference between Jeff and Aaron
probably meant Aaron was the younger, so he was like Miles.
And, ah, there's like...
It's so many nice layers in this, uh... hinted at in this sequence.
So, our production designer, Justin Thompson...
Genius.
Is not here, but, uh, should be.
- Because... - Because he's a genius.
He's a genius and had a huge impact
on how this movie looks and, uh...
Definitely.
All the, you know, all the different styles.
The... you know, he's a big...
He knows a lot about comic books. He knows a lot about art.
He has worked with Phil and Chris for a long time,
so he knows a lot about them.
- And he, uh, he was... - For blackmail purposes.
I would say also a quick little thing
about time-lapse in an animated film.
It's actually so much harder than, um, a regular scene.
Because you have to create everything as if it happened.
Um, so, you're creating much more work than you're actually seeing.
Mm-hmm.
Imageworks hated those moments, but loved them in the end.
Right, and now, obviously,
the comic book language has gotten more front and center.
From the moment the spider bit him, everything has gotten more
into the comic book language in Miles's universe.
I think, Rodney, it was your idea to hold off on this motif
until Miles got bit,
and that the spider powers, uh, brought this language into his world.
Yeah, to try to use it... I don't know if it was literally my idea.
I think it might have been an idea that was around that I was into.
But, um... But the idea to try to use that stuff to show you,
in a heightened way, what Miles is feeling, you know?
I'm actually gonna just take that one.
- 'Cause that was my idea. - Take the credit?
'Cause it was literally in the...
I wrote it down in the... on my paper
when I came in and talked to Mike Moon and Kristine Belson about the treatment.
- Yeah, yeah. - Oh, wow.
So, I think I probably heard it from you and then...
So I guess it's really... Peter, I guess, is the real brainchild.
I wasn't gonna say anything, but...
This was always a scene from Phil's very first draft
of the motion picture.
The Gwanda hair scene.
Yeah, boarded by Miguel Jiron.
The great Miguel Jiron.
Yeah, who's, um, one of our, like, younger story guys
who just really, um, was a lover of comic books,
but just also has, just, like...
You couldn't crush the guy. He just kept producing work.
Yeah, he was a super...
No matter how hard we tried.
- Poor Gwanda. - Oh, I know.
Uh, at one point that door was like nine feet tall,
and Miles looked like he was three feet tall.
- Okay, here's the guy. - Look, here comes smiley boy.
- Oh, he's back! - Here he is.
That's the closest he gets to looking in the camera.
Yeah.
So this is one of our moments when we kind of deploy all our weapons
with chromatic aberration and, uh, composition.
Here come panels.
Is this the first time panels come into Miles's world?
- Yes. - Yeah.
And it's escalating in every dimension,
the color, the sound.
You snuck out last night, Morales.
Play dumb!
Who's Morales?
And you can hear the lovely whistling score,
part of Daniel Pemberton's really inventive score,
which had, you know, all sorts of crazy stuff,
where he had an 80-piece orchestra that he had burned onto vinyl,
and then scratched on top of that, the record,
uh, used every weird instrumentation,
used, like, comic books and newspaper as percussion instruments, uh,
and everything you can imagine.
- Very, very inventive. - He's amazing.
One quick thing that just, there's, like, a whip pan in there.
And in a movie where you don't use motion blur,
if you guys frame-by-frame through that whip pan toward the door,
you will see every face being sort of graphically stretched and drawn on
to try to make it so you don't pass out when we strobe.
And that goes, you know, for many scenes in this movie.
If you freeze on them, especially if there's a lot of motion in them,
you'll see that the animators have many, many tools.
Uh, rather than use motion blur, they used, uh...
They would stretch limbs, they would have more than one limb,
they, um, all kinds of funny frames if you...
- Drybrush effects. - Exactly.
I mean, we really went back to what used to be, um, you know,
a really common tool in 2-D animation...
but, you know, became a much more complicated thing
when you're starting to have a camera that moves around like this, and you know...
But it makes for some really beautiful single-frame imagery.
That's Bob Persichetti on the front cover of the Spider-Man,
based on a classic cover.
And the rest of us are actually on the back of that comic book.
- I think including Amy and Avi. - Yeah, Amy and Avi, Pam Marsden.
And others, Christina Steinberg.
Love it.
This is my favorite shot.
This was the first shot, uh, of daytime that we all saw together.
Talk about a lodestar.
Yeah, that was like, "This is what the movie should look like."
That was our "This is what the movie should look like" shot.
This was another thing that we just discovered with the animators,
the idea that, um, that we could really have fun with the text on screen
and the dialogue boxes.
Where if they moved in Z-depth, in space, as he ran away from the words...
See Brian Bendis?
You got Brian Bendis and Sara Pichelli on that phone right there.
The Davis family has some interesting, uh, friends.
Yeah.
They're friends with a lot of great comic book legends.
There's a lot of discussion over the course of the movie
about Miles's face and the way, you know, the shape of it,
and to be able to have a very specific-looking character
that doesn't necessarily look like a traditional animated CG character.
And that's something that I mainly watched my partners talk about
and learn from just the way they kind of just worked and worked and worked Miles,
so that, you know, using lines drawn on his face
and different textures and dots
and anything to make, uh, his face and his, you know, model
look more specific and more angular and, uh, more graphic, and that was cool.
That spider thing right there,
I've seen it 2,000 times, and it still makes my heart skip.
A lot of that had to do with the mix,
like, just dialing the sound perfectly so it gets just quiet enough right before.
And this is our first time seeing Miles's Spider-Sense, uh,
which we developed for quite some time, as far as how to...
make it its own thing.
And using the language from the comic books.
Call out Danny Dimian, the VFX supervisor, who did amazing work.
Yeah, this was like, you know,
the thing that we were really lucky to get to do
was to bring all these graphic elements into this film.
So it was like, the idea that we could show the very first time a Spider-Man,
or aspiring Spider-Man, could have his Spider-Sense was a real joy.
So, our Green Goblin is obviously a giant,
and, uh, that comes from the way the Goblin's depicted
in the Ultimate Universe Miles comics.
In this universe, Norman Osborn turned into this gigantic creature of a goblin.
So we kind of took that ball and ran with it.
There goes one of our first little, uh, burst card kinda flash frames.
Yeah, more Goblin and less Norman.
You can see some of the amazing effects animation
that uses 2-D and comic book effects techniques for those explosions,
with the onomatopoeia, like, built in.
And it was very difficult to dial in the right level of that stuff
that felt integrated.
But everybody working on this movie was really passionate and gave it a lot extra.
Yeah, and I think the thing,
the other thing that, I think, a lot of people, um, just assume
is that it's only just hand-drawn 2-D stuff.
But it's actually dimensionalized, um,
and then rendered super, super flat as well.
So there's, like, there's a lot of...
So, that's why, in 3-D, it has a real special feel as well.
We did the most expensive possible treatment.
- It would've been cheaper... - In all choices.
Exactly, including those shoes.
Mm-hmm.
Which apparently are very expensive now on the World Wide Web.
People asked how does Miles, with a cop and nurse parents, afford Jordans.
And they're a gift from his uncle. That's the answer.
There you go.
You just watched Peter and Miles kind of have their Spider-Senses harmonize.
And you can see how the color, um, started different and becomes the same.
Yeah, this little moment really became, like, such a...
I mean, I think it carried sort of the next, sort of,
I don't know, five minutes of the movie, just that little interaction.
Right.
I think the intimacy...
That's a big trick, I thought, of this whole movie,
and that we discovered as we went,
is that the intimacy between the characters was the thing.
And anytime we didn't experience it, you kind of disengaged.
And that moment we dialed in really carefully,
to make you care about this version of Peter and the relationship with Miles.
Yeah, in the hope that, like, this guy's gonna be his mentor.
- Mm-hmm. - Yeah.
Then it seems like making him relatable by being so tired right there,
that's a real Peter Parker-y thing.
We gotta call out this amazing fight choreo that you guys did.
Just amazing.
Yeah, our animators...
This was one of the earlier scenes we got to animate.
And they went crazy getting to animate Prowler fighting Peter.
- Oh, man. It's so fast. - Yeah.
And I like how relatable Miles is here,
where his first instinct is to just take pictures on his phone of what's happening.
One of the big tricks... Here's the introduction of Kingpin.
A lifetime supply of pens 'cause he breaks them quite often.
He breaks 'em a lot.
You know one of... We were...
really interested in the animation possibilities of Kingpin.
And these guys...
Yeah, I mean, really quick, just to talk to that,
we always had this idea that he was sort of an expression of a black hole,
you know, living expression of a black hole.
And so the rig, for him, is this floating head on a body
that we could scale up and down, depending on the shot,
with hands at the end of arms, and it was completely pliable.
- He's literally a black hole. - Yes.
But how could he be an illustration instead of a rig?
While creating a black hole. He is the embodiment of that.
This map I was insisting on for some reason.
- I like it. - It felt so important to me.
- It's clarifying. - Yeah.
When this series of images, of the, um,
you know, inside the collider room, started to show up from lighting,
I remember I kind of couldn't believe it.
Yeah.
It doesn't obey any real laws of, you know, actual, physical lighting.
- Suddenly the room's mint green. - Everything just freaks out.
Yeah, and the other thing that ended up being really cool
was there was just this, you know, this echoing, visual thematic thing
of those collider beams.
You know, obviously they're inspired kind of by Kirby Dots,
but at the same time, it kind of feels like spray paint coming out of a can.
And all these things just kind of built on top of each other,
and they really helped it all feel like it fit together.
For non-comics people, when we say Kirby Dots,
these little black, bubbling dots,
the great Jack Kirby, like, king of comic book artists,
would use that as sort of a way to show, like, cosmic energy.
If you freeze-frame Spider-Man's face as he's in the thing,
you can see flashes of all the other characters
that are about to show up.
His quantum signature is kind of resonating with Spider-Men
in all the other universes and drawing them.
- Right, it's almost like... - Like a cosmic magnet.
But that cross-cutting,
that happened in edit pretty late in the game,
saved us from a bunch of corny ADR. lines.
- Yeah, absolutely. - I get it. I get it, I guess.
It's comic book science.
Yeah, and the magic of, like, visual storytelling.
A picture does a lot more.
- It just kinda looks cool, too. - That is for sure.
We gotta call out the lighting in this movie. It is just so expressive.
And I've never seen anything like it in animation.
You guys outdid yourselves.
- Oh, man, it's our... - Our amazing team, just geniuses.
Every time we were in digital dailies,
it was, um, inspiring and also intimidating.
There were a few early meetings among everyone...
um, you know, where we had everyone together,
and Phil and Chris kind of expressed to everyone a just general MO,
in every department, to try to push, uh, conventions wherever we could.
And there were a lot of veterans on the movie.
It wasn't all... It wasn't really, like, all young guns.
It was a lot of people who had a lot of experience
who were all really hungry to push themselves.
So after that MO was sort of thrown down, or after the gauntlet was thrown down,
these departments really started to bring back their own crazy ideas.
And a lot of times, our direction was sort of us just going, "Yeah, cool."
- "Go harder." - Yeah.
Go harder. Blond Spider-Man, by the way. Blond Spider-Man.
Blond Spider-Man, designed to be, uh, in great contrast to the other,
Peter B. Parker, that we meet later.
I like that he's exhausted at the idea of being killed.
- Right? Just like... - Look at that eye roll.
Yeah, our animators... I mean, here's a perfect scene.
I mean, I know we're about to enter something dark here for a second.
But all the line work that you see on their faces
for all those expressive moments
are all hand-drawn by our animators on top of doing the CG performance.
So, that's why they were only able to do maybe a second a week.
Which is a quarter of, um, a typical pace.
Here goes The Prowler.
- This sequence was the first... - Here goes The Prowler noise.
Yeah, this is one of the earlier ones that came through.
The first sequence that went through the whole pipeline.
- That's right. - It was helpful that it was dark.
Yeah, this one and the cemetery. We chose two very dark sequences.
- Yes. - That wasn't by accident.
It's a good combination of, like, very naturalistic lighting
and extremely un-naturalistic illustration of that lighting.
Yeah, I mean, obviously all of the light sources are in half-tone dots.
Look at that.
We do all these flash frames, uh, of just, like, comic book panelization.
Um, Prowler's boots have this crazy, hand-drawn, like, neon glow effect.
And the whole thing gets really graphic.
When everything turns to the light, it's just line work.
It's really, really inventive in like a dozen different ways.
It's such an amazing...
That's Bob Persichetti hand-drawn.
- Hand-drawn. - That's the only one.
I had such, you know, high hopes to do a lot of those.
I think that's the only one I actually did.
- You got a bit busy. - I got a little bit busy.
You had a few things to do.
This is amazing.
- Yeah. - Just one of the best.
I don't think you ever see something like this, um,
or at least you haven't, um,
definitely not in feature animation in America,
but just also the camerawork that's in here too.
- Yeah. - So much back and forth.
It's a great combination...
Oh, there's Post Malone's big Banksy laugh.
But the combination of observation and naturalism,
and on top of it, extremely pushed illustration style.
Just, like, they work in perfect harmony there.
I'm really, really happy with what you guys did.
And then the whole thing gets brought, grounded down to a much more...
relatable, simple thing,
after your heart needs just a second to not have a heart attack.
Yeah, this is a sequence
where all three of these actors just shine to me.
They feel so authentic, and it's so intimate.
And, uh, you feel like these are people who...
I feel like they live together. You know? I really get them.
There's so much emotional detail and complexity in these performances,
both from the voice actors,
but really the animation team, you know,
did so much with the spaces in between the lines.
I gotta call out Luna Velez here, who's so naturalistic and sweet.
Oh, my goodness.
Her warmth is... just radiates off the screen.
I can't believe this was the first time she's done voice-over.
- Her voice is incredible. - Yeah, I know. Incredible.
Also, I want to point out the use of Spanish in the movie,
that we never translate it,
except for one memorable time later in the film.
For effect, yeah.
Yeah, but the idea being that this is just the fabric of his life.
And that was, you know, also inspired, obviously,
by Brian Michael Bendis's and Miles's sort of bicultural background,
but also Phil Lord grew up in a bilingual house.
That's true, and that's just kind of how it is.
Yeah, exactly.
And I took Spanish in high school, so...
- And there you go. - I failed it three years in a row.
This song, I have to say, elevated this scene quite a bit.
It's a really wonderful song.
The prices in the world, this world, are very high
is another key that this is another dimension.
The inflation in Miles's dimension is out of control.
- And now this scene. - Here we come.
This, uh, we'd been working on for over a year.
And it took on a new poignancy
when, uh, Stan passed away a few weeks back at this recording.
And yet, he can still deliver that line right there.
He's really funny.
We went to his office and recorded those lines.
It's the only performer in the movie who we went to.
Everyone else came into recording studios,
but Stan Lee, we dispatched the microphone to him.
He's earned it.
Our head of animation, Josh Beveridge, true name,
he was holding on to all those shots for himself.
And we ran out of time in the entire...
So he had to give them out one-by-one to his crew
and it was probably the most painful thing he did on this movie.
Everybody wanted to animate Stan Lee.
And so also, just so you guys...
If you hit pause anytime a train goes by,
because everybody wanted to animate Stan, he's in almost every single train.
He's an extra in a lot.
If you notice in that comic book, uh, it's a True Life Tales of Spider-Man,
and to keep his cover, his name is not Peter Parker.
In the comic books his name is Billy Barker.
Great.
- Who could figure that? - No one could guess.
It's brilliant.
Brilliant. It throws everyone off the trail.
- Yeah. - Exactly.
That joke killed and slayed.
- I think that was... - From the beginning.
It's either... It was Phil, Chris, or Rodney,
I can't remember who, which one of you guys did that first,
but it was, um, it was a wonderful joke.
I mean, that's what the movie does great, I think,
is take what you're used to and try to... remix it.
- I love that. - Yeah.
And here's another 42.
The reason why, 42 is the number of the lottery ball that picked Miles.
It also was picked because it was, uh, Jackie Robinson's jersey number.
And this comes from Brian Bendis.
- Yep. - Mm-hmm.
And has nothing to do with Douglas Adams.
- Which people... - Or does it?
Maybe we don't know. Maybe Douglas Adams is...
It's an alternate universe, you know?
This was also the other first scene that we had lit and rendered
and also the first scene that we saw in 3-D, uh, which blew all of our minds.
Oh, my gosh.
Seeing that Charlie Brown-style snow in three dimensions.
I think everybody was kind of overwhelmed seeing this stuff come in.
A bunch of little drawings there around the grave,
around the tombstone, that were all done by different kids of people on the show.
Mm-hmm.
I wanna do what you asked.
I really do.
This is very, like, really some of the earliest animation on Miles,
and I think we were still trying to figure out how to bring him to life.
We went back in and retouched some of 'em,
but you can see that his performance evolved from this scene.
At least, I can see it. Maybe you guys can't.
It's still really expressive.
Yeah, it's pretty expressive, yeah.
There was a whole, uh, debate
as to how much paunch Peter B. Parker should have in these shots.
- It's different in every shot. - It's adjustable.
But, but like, how much of a little bit of a little, uh, flabby belly
does this have in this introductory shot.
We had... There was, like,
I remember looking at three to five different versions of... of paunch.
- Yes. - And here comes Jake Johnson.
Jake Johnson, just nailing it as Peter B. Parker.
- Coca-Cola. - Yeah.
Is there any better everyman than Jake Johnson?
- No. - Not in my book.
I know, right? He's what every man aspires to be as an everyman.
Very few people have noticed that he had a Jewish wedding.
A couple people have.
And you know, it could be in this dimension, Phil,
that Buddhists step on glass.
- Yeah, that's... - There you go.
I suppose that's true.
Or it could be that Peter Parker is Jewish. Anything's possible.
Because he was created by a son of Jewish immigrants.
That's one of my favorite cuts,
crying in the shower to, um, pinned to the bed.
The pose, the body pose on the futon is really...
- Oh, my God, and the seahorses. - Meme ready.
Yep.
The little quivering eyes on that shot always get me,
on the seahorse-watching shot.
That was a Phil add to that montage
that, uh, that I would say saved the montage.
- The seahorses. - The seahorses, the, um...
just a lot of the extra funny things in this.
But this was real weird.
Kirby Dots.
Oh, yeah.
Kirby Dots, lighting...
Everything turns into, like, a nightclub all of a sudden.
This animation is so fun.
Mm-hmm.
- Pizza. - Hmm.
This background is based on a painting, largely, by Justin Thompson,
who, once again, genius.
And it's hard to tell here, but that's where his... Yeah, his...
the bottom half of his pants are off, and that's why he has to wear sweatpants.
- This is like freeze-frame heaven. - Yeah, exactly.
There are a lot of...
a lot of differences in their dimension.
One of the subtle ones is that, uh,
John Mulaney and Nick Kroll have a show in our dimension called Oh, Hello,
and in their dimension it's called Hi, Hello.
That's perhaps the smallest difference.
Was the thing that got him killed.
You wanna know what happened next?
Here we are, back in the cemetery.
That was a really late-breaking sort of comic book page-flipping device
that we finally figured out how to do, um,
and it now feels, like, seamless, so... success.
Like it was always intended from the beginning.
Man, this is another really early, uh...
Mm-hmm.
Wow, this is when I was spending more time in animation.
Yeah, this is bringing back memories.
It is, it's really like when we were really, um, trying very hard to...
- Finding the vibe. - Yeah.
And to commit to this, like...
an aesthetic, um, that didn't have...
that was on twos, you know,
that was a crunchier sort of version of animation and also no motion blur.
And we were... You know, that's a pretty active scene with some big camera sweeps,
and we had to do a lot of problem-solving in there.
And one of the first sequences that got boarded and embellished by you guys,
and kind of elevated from what was happening in the script.
Yeah, this one was always fun.
This was like,
"Let's go on a ride, but then let's also make sure that we can pull way back
and have funny, sort of flat, tableau moments
where it feels like you're just a passerby."
Yeah, and just, I mean, just seeing the work on New York
in this sequence just blows my mind.
This is unbelievable.
You can call out Dean Gordon for his amazing color sense.
- Yeah. - The mighty Dean Gordon.
Making things feel...
- Chris Miller voice cameo. - There it is.
Police dispatch officer.
- Yeah, one of the things... - The role I was born to play.
Like, as someone that had very little to nothing to do
with, uh, how the light in this sequence works, like,
and also as somebody that lived in New York for a long time,
I just love how some of these scenes capture
what it feels like to be in New York, or what the light feels like in New York,
if you're walking around late at night or in the snow.
- Um... - Poof.
I still don't know how they did that, and I worked on the movie.
There comes Stan Lee, right here, walking over him.
On the cell phone, too.
Yeah.
- He's got places to be. - Yeah.
- Movie's over. - The movie hasn't broken, guys.
Very long black. That's a very long black.
We thought you really needed a break.
Yeah.
Also a little time for the sound team to goof off a little bit.
Yeah.
- Geoff Rubay. - Yeah.
This was also another early sequence that...
Mm-hmm.
That, uh, really kind of helped define...
This was the very first sequence where we really got into Peter
and his performance, and, um, and I mean,
it was amazing, starting to see Jake's words being performed by this model.
They felt like they belonged together in such a perfect way.
It's a good meeting of two characters, for sure.
Yeah. Oh, for sure.
That was a good meet for Miles, early on in this too.
This was one of the ones where he started to, like, get a little more character.
Yeah.
This shot, specifically right there,
was a big breakthrough for a lot of our animators,
that he could be that expressive, that he could bounce around like a kid.
You know, we'd always had this idea that he's like, um, almost like Bambi,
like a young deer with his limbs, um,
but he also had to have that... that sort of excitement,
and a little bit clumsy.
And they really kind of nailed it here while still making him feel, uh, cool,
like a 13-year-old from Brooklyn.
We also chose the most challenging possible lighting scenario
for that scene.
That's the first we really see the glitch effect,
which, uh, Danny Dimian and his team achieved
by putting something like seven or eight cameras
on the same model from different directions,
and then basically just picking different angles
to show Peter vacillating between different dimensions.
And I have to say
that I felt like we got away with a lot of really bold camera choices,
especially this one specifically.
Like, burying him on the bottom of the frame
and just getting to have fun with this sequence,
this whole sequence of the walk and talk.
We should call out the layout team
led by James Williams and Dave Morehead and...
Rich Turner.
Yes, and Paul Watling and the whole story team
that were able to take, like, shots like this
where our orientation is all messed up
but you still have a total, awesome sense of where everybody is
and what's up and down.
We were passionate that a Spider-Man movie
needed to be shot kind of from their point of view,
where every surface can be the ground.
Yeah.
We also, in this one, I will just say,
because of questions on the Internet,
we took off one of Miles's shoes just in case anybody wanted to know
why he was sticking, in case they didn't think...
Another thing I was passionate about
but nobody cared about really but me.
But now it's an awesome detail, so.
No more questions.
He hasn't taken off the insoles yet,
so he didn't have his stick powers go through.
But he will later, when he has time, remove the insoles.
Still, though, the calf strength necessary to walk on a wall...
There's kind of a Peter Ramsey cameo.
That was Peter Ramsey, yep. Looking bewildered, as usual.
One of the big tricks of this sequence and this relationship
was to let you believe that Peter was a good guy
even though he was being a real turkey to Miles.
This was kind of one of the few moments
that we added into the movie kind of late...
Mm-hmm.
To know that he was a sweet pea underneath it all.
Finding the right level for his sort of not caring about Miles
and then learning to care about Miles and finding the right level...
from the beginning all the way through, uh, to the end
was something that took a lot of nuance.
The previous scene and this scene is also worth calling out.
In a movie that had many iterations,
that scene and this scene probably had the most.
Yes, definitely. Definitely.
Which is funny 'cause it's a simple scene
of two people in a diner talking.
But it had to carry a fair amount of exposition and story stuff.
And, um, you know, we probably made and remade those scenes, what?
- Fifty times? Seventy-five times? - I would say more.
And one of the tricks is it's a lot of talking in both scenes.
And both scenes, by themselves, were delightful.
And when you put them together, along with the one that's coming up,
it just felt like you got tired.
And, uh, it was really challenging to figure out
what needed to stay and what needed to go.
And we overcorrected in both directions many times.
It didn't come out seamlessly the first time.
But we finally found the right level for everything, I think.
That cut to the burger's hilarious.
Right, exactly, and we actually...
And this music choice turned out to be the best.
We squirted ketchup at the screen.
Yeah, ketchup on the screen.
Spider-Man doesn't wear a cape.
- So how do we retrace Peter's steps? - That's a good question.
What would I do if I were me?
Got it.
I infiltrate the lab.
Find the head scientist's computer.
That lady with the bike is the head scientist. I saw her in this documentary.
Cool! Step Three: I reexamine my personal biases.
I hack the computer.
It's not technically hacking.
Not now. I just lost my train of thought.
This is another style of comic book animation that's in the film.
There's many, many different styles, uh, represented in this film.
Uh, I kind of miss the unfinished version of this shot
where his feet, uh...
He had no toes for a really long time for some reason,
and I'm not sure why.
But you had to say like 50 times, "We're gonna add toes, right?"
Yeah, "We're gonna get his toes on there, right?"
That's new.
Here he comes.
One of the things about Kingpin is that
he just magically appeared outside of the car
because there's no way he could actually get through a doorway.
Yeah, maybe in a future
where you guys are listening to this ten years from now
someone will have figured out how to animate that.
But in 2018, it's still impossible.
Yeah.
This is another sequence that was in the movie for a really long time, um,
in many different lengths and forms.
It ended up being kind of, you know, just the proper length and just enough.
But these moments right here were really where you started
to feel the relationship between the two of them develop.
The bond of the Spider-Team.
I just love that they both have to...
Miles has to fight to occupy the same space
and become an equal partner to Peter.
One of my favorite shots is about to come up,
when we're above them.
- This one. I love that. - Yeah.
That's really fun.
And I got the password.
Mr. Fisk. If we fire again this week,
there could be a black hole under Brooklyn.
You see this? And this?
This is multiple dimensions beginning to crash into each other.
This another case where we, uh, for the sake of a laugh,
undercut the stakes, and then immediately have to buy the stakes back at the end.
"Yep, that was all bad, actually."
That's bad. Actually, everything she said was bad. I was lying before.
Ah, just great. This animation is so cool.
The hints of, uh, everything being octagonal...
from the lighting to all of the science-y stuff.
A hint of who's coming up.
- Was that a Justin thing? - I don't think so, I think...
- I don't remember. - We talked about it in design.
- Exactly. - Yeah.
This is also a moment to call out...
Yeah, both of our voice actors right there,
- Liev Schreiber and Kathryn Hahn, who... - That's right.
Man, she's amazing.
And, uh, yeah. She... I'd love to see her own movie,
where we spend a little more time with her.
I hope she gets to take a little victory lap
after this movie comes out.
'Cause we were keeping her, like, a secret
because we didn't want, uh, people to catch on
to the big twist that comes with her.
But she's a real key to this movie.
And a blast to work with, too.
We went through probably 70 different versions
of what Miles would look like invisible.
- Which sounds ridiculous. - Took about a year.
You're like, "No, that's it. There you go. It's easy."
You're like, "Nope." It is... It turns out it's very challenging.
And I like his sort of... How he comes in and out of invisibility
is really stylized as well in a really cool way.
It was inspired by Sue Storm to some degree.
- Mm-hmm. - Mm-hmm.
Oh, man.
This entire sequence is one that went through so many iterations
and so much work.
And it just came together at the end.
It pays off.
It's finally one of the great, like, successes of the movie.
And the audience really goes for it.
And no one will know that it was, like, really bad for like three months.
No, and it really was.
It was, like, one of the most wonderful surprises.
The only reason it got good is 'cause everybody worked super hard on it
for months and months and months.
This might pinch a little.
Look at those octagonal hand braces.
That is based on Phil Lord's actual desktop.
Yes, it basically looks like that.
Phil's a little more messy than that,
but it was too messy, you couldn't...
A lot of icons, they kind of collect on the edges,
because I just drag things off of the Internet.
I like that in the glitch we just saw...
I'm just remembering all the conversations about that particular glitch
that determined that it was funniest if you left Peter's head un-glitched.
Yeah, the rough animation was so good.
- Pneumatic. - Doc Ock.
Justin Thompson, production designer, fantastic idea to use soft robotics
as the basis for Doc Ock... this version of Doc Ock's tentacles.
- And it's so cool. It's so different. - It's very creepy.
Yeah, it's really creepy.
But it created opportunities for everyone,
from animation all the way to the sound team,
who, about three months before we were done, would go,
"Oh, that's what they look like.
We're gonna have to redo this whole thing."
- It was a late-breaking... - And wait, who's this?
- Hmm. - What do you know?
- Is that Gwanda? - Who's been sneaking around?
Just amazing animation in here, just incredible.
- So funny, so energetic. - Yes.
And a good counterpoint between, like, very silly things happening
right around very cool things.
Yeah. Yeah, exactly.
Like, "Don't need the monitor," is such a goofy physical performance.
And right next to it is, like, all this very believable, like, cool action stuff.
It was based on the really crude animation in the layout
that was in forever, and that always made me laugh.
And bagel-related comedy also.
A surprising number of bagel jokes.
It is.
And the last-minute bagel text that was added right there.
Which was a joke pitch.
It was a pitch that was a joke that, uh, Justin Thompson...
That was taken seriously, and I love.
Yeah, there's so much inventiveness from every level of this, uh, production
that everyone felt empowered to, like, pitch crazy ideas.
And that's why it feels so rich with, uh... and deep.
I gotta call out Patrick O'Keefe, our amazing, uh, kinda...
- Did he get an art director title? - I think he became co-art director.
- Co-art director. - He and Dean.
Like really, kind of, uh, the look of this sequence,
the graphic look of the trees,
the design of Alchemax, all that stuff,
Patrick was just, like... The guy is a monster.
It is no understatement to say that this look in the forest
is one of the hardest things to accomplish in a movie like this.
To make something look realistic is something we know how to do pretty well,
but to make it look graphic and illustrative is almost impossible.
Especially when you're, like, close and far to trees, uh,
within the same shot at times, it's very hard.
Yeah, I mean, remember,
we had so many conversations with Danny, our VFX supe, about, like,
"But, you guys, we're gonna be in a forest.
You really don't want the leaves to rustle in the wind?"
We're like, "No, we'll be okay."
This great moment.
This is another moment in the story
when we really open this beat up
to let Peter and Miles have a victory together
and cement their bond
that you really were rooting for their relationship.
We used to breeze through this quickly,
and you didn't have the same connection with the two of them.
I mean, one of things, like, in the screenplay
that we discovered really late
was that you needed to have a lot of smaller, positive accomplishments
throughout the center of the movie for it to work right.
Yeah, and the thing that helps support that real connection,
which was a hard cue to get, was with Daniel Pemberton.
Remember, that one, Phil, was a like a back and forth...
- Making it really sweet. - Yeah. It was hard.
This middle section of the movie is about
Peter and Miles learning to, you know, fall for each other, essentially.
Yeah. Basically.
You needed to go from, like, a meet-cute to this kind of middle beat
where they're really starting to fall in love.
And in comes Spider-Gwen.
Gwanda?
- So cool. - Such a cool haircut, too.
- I mean, her first line... - That character...
That character's so iconic from the comics that Jason and Robbi and Rico made.
- There you go. - There it is.
Just gorgeous. Look at that look.
Hailee Steinfeld...
This is all inspired by... the actual comics.
I could barely believe my eyes when I saw
what the art department had done with the look of it.
'Cause it's so evocative of the comics, and it's so... It's just gorgeous.
Using Rico's crazy color palette, uh... I mean, all of them.
It feels like you're inside one of those comics.
And if you haven't read Gwen's comics,
she is, uh, she's bitten by a spider in her universe,
and Peter Parker is jealous, her best friend, and becomes a bad guy.
That's what I was going to say.
We give just enough to hopefully tease, um, you guys
into being really interested into each one of these characters' origin story.
This is another, uh, like...
You can see a reverse time-lapse when she was blown into last week.
One week of days and nights just passed in that one shot.
She hit a time anomaly on her way to this dimension.
Then this was fun, you know.
She vibed with Miles, um, after he had been bitten by the spider.
And she purposely bumped into him there, in case you didn't catch that.
Yeah, I like that piece of animation.
I get to like your haircut though, right?
Sure, yeah.
Look, see? The leaves can move, you guys.
We just chose for them not to.
Yeah, I mean, that's the thing is
it was an absolute creative choice.
And this art style, uh, is inspired by, um,
Sienkiewicz's version of Kingpin.
Yeah. My God, look at that.
This is a sequence boarded by Peter Ramsey,
in my recollection, in like four hours.
Yes, it was insane.
Watching you board this in real-time was pretty amazing.
You're like, "Oh, my God."
- You are an absolute genius. - I got caught.
I can't let people see that it doesn't take as long as it looks.
"Yeah, I'm gonna need two weeks for that."
I'll tell you, it takes the rest of us a lot longer to draw one frame
that looks like the way you can draw one frame.
But I think that sequence highlights the things
that I get most inspired about by Peter and his work
'cause it's really emotional and it's really graphic.
And there's a lot of sensitivity for the characters in the picture.
You know, it's not just, like, cool drawings.
It's cool drawings in service of, you know, real humanity.
- And shot in an unexpected way. - I'm blushing over here.
This was always fun.
Yeah, it was important to have Doc Ock be formidable, you know,
'cause she was so, like, wacky and silly as a scientist,
to have her, when she's in Doc Ock form, be really intimidating
so the stakes of the movie felt strong.
Yeah, we were trying to just make her, you know,
such an intelligent, socially awkward person, um,
that then turns into this really, yeah, formidable,
you know, equal to Kingpin.
This is a scene that gave us a lot of trouble for a long time.
And in the end,
having these characters just talk to each other
in an honest and authentic way,
and then having our two great performers perform it, uh,
kind of dug us out.
Yeah, you can just kinda like, "Just take it easy, stupid.
Just let the characters talk."
Yeah. And then, um, then the animators just, you know, sold it.
Added a lot of subtlety.
One of my favorite poses in the movie.
That pose gets a laugh all by itself.
And the fact that the he webs the doorbell
I think is just a delicious little detail.
And then the legendary Lily Tomlin...
coming on the scene.
You know you needed somebody really groovy to play Aunt May.
Yeah, and I think there's a little hint to who she is
because she's holding a baseball bat.
Um... She's a tough lady.
She's not afraid to use it.
I love the fact that both Lily gets a laugh on sweatpants,
and Hailee gets a laugh on her response to the sweatpants.
It's a double laugh on top of laugh from two really, really talented actors.
- And older. And thicker. - Yeah. I've heard that already.
Oh, jeez. Are those sweatpants?
"You look tired" is a thing my mom says to me every time I see her.
She's... It's accurate.
Brooklyn.
Did Peter have a place where we could make another one of these?
A goober.
Everybody calls it a goober.
Another hint as to what a tough cookie Aunt May is.
I fought hard to have her kick that door open.
I tried to cut that, and then you un-cut it correctly.
- I'm sorry. - No, you were right. I was wrong.
Let's be honest. She's not treating her own house very well.
It's true.
That was part of it, why I was like, "Why is she kicking the door?"
And then I was wrong, guys. I was wrong!
It's implied that she's kind of an engineer herself.
Yeah.
And that she's kind of the Q of this dimension.
Lots of Easter eggs here, guys.
There we go.
We should have put an actual Easter egg in this shot.
- I know, honestly. - I know. We actually...
That would have been the most Rodney Rothman joke ever.
Yeah, fair enough.
All kinds of suits in the background.
Mm-hmm. We're not gonna tell you what they all are, but...
- No. - But they're all real.
- Yes. - They're all based on something.
We get to have a nice, little intimate moment here.
This is another time where you just let the animators
build a performance of looks between characters.
And it's... I think it's not something that you often see in animation.
- I love that look there. - And this look here.
- That Gwen look is good. - It gives you so much.
It's really something that, um,
that, uh, we had the freedom to do in this movie,
and it really... It's just a connective thing.
- It helped us a lot. - Yeah.
And if you have the story to, you know, for the context to back it up,
you know exactly what each of those looks means and why they're there.
Kingpin knows we're coming.
We're going to be outnumbered.
And now we're gonna get to meet the rest of the Spidey Squad.
Shift into crazy gear.
- Yes. "Hello, my name is..." - Yep.
I remember, Rodney, you calling me in London
and asking whether it was a good idea or not to introduce these other folks.
- And it was a real debate. - At all.
- Because we knew... Yeah, at all. - Exactly.
'Cause we knew once they came into the movie,
it was going to become a different kind of picture.
I think I was probably just afraid of how much work
it would be for everyone to figure it out.
- So I was like... - I think you were right.
To balance it enough so that each one of them gets
enough of a moment to be worth in the picture
but doesn't take away from Miles's story.
- That's the thing... - Really hard.
Yeah, and the thing that finally made it work
was that they all have a reaction to being in this situation
that is representative of being, you know, a Spider-Person.
It's all a selfless reaction.
"I'll give myself up so you guys can all go home."
Which then just fed into, "No, we have one guy here who's from this place.
This is his job, and he can't do it yet."
You know, so it ended up really helping put pressure on Miles.
Well, also, it was a pretty late addition,
but them saying, "You're like me,"
I think helped justify this story turn, you know, because it...
- And its whole thematic... Yeah. - Yeah.
It... Nothing worked in the movie
until it had to do something with Miles and his story.
- Yep. - And now, as you can see,
each of these characters is animated in their own style.
Their world is designed in a different style, and... of animation.
It allowed all the animators to try different techniques
from various different genres
and smash 'em all together into one world.
And it makes the idea of multiple universes really tangible.
- Yeah. - You can see it. You can feel it.
For the look of Ham's world,
people can Google, uh, something called Pigs Is Pigs,
which I'd never heard of before this movie.
Ward Kimball, uh, designed a Walt Disney short
imitating the UPA cartoons.
It was first introduced us, to us, by Mike Moon,
who was an executive on this movie
and also happens to be an Emmy-winning production designer himself.
We should also call out the amazing performances
by Nicolas Cage, Kimiko Glenn, and John Mulaney,
who brought so much personality and life to each of these characters.
Who are you again?
- Still makes me laugh. - Yeah.
This kid can turn himself invisible. Watch this. He can do it now.
I can't.
This was another sequence that gave us a lot of headaches.
- True. - A lot of headaches.
Again, another area with a lot of exposition, uh,
to try and, like, set up what the goal for the third act is going to be
and what the issues are going to be for Miles in a way that...
doesn't bore anybody or confuse anybody, and it was really hard.
Yeah, and it's... I just remember when this worked comedically.
It just sat there forever,
and then suddenly, we saw it with an audience.
- And they were screaming. - Yeah.
- Fight them all off at once? - I haven't actually fought anyone.
And the big change was that we watched...
I think it was because we saw Miles make an attempt to succeed
in between Peter's lines.
- That was really new. - Yeah.
And we thinned out a lot of stuff. That helped.
Mm-hmm.
You mean we weren't exhausted by the time we got here?
Right, exactly.
- Can you be strong? - Ruthless?
- Disciplined? - I don't know. Maybe.
I think also, like, late-breaking was the stuff that was added
on the backside of this that really made it feel...
like they were all...
They all cared about Miles,
even if they didn't maybe believe in him right here.
- Right. - Right.
- That's right. - Just Peter going, "Cool it."
For the longest time, we didn't have something like that.
It's a real, uh... When you're making a movie,
it's like you're building an emotion machine.
You know, and you've got to have all the parts calibrated the right way,
and kind of make sure it's properly oiled.
'Cause if it doesn't, something... The gears are gonna stick, and...
you're not gonna...
you're not gonna feel right.
Did you know like 20 years ago, Pat Riley trademarked "emotion machine"?
Did you know?
- Damn it, I'm too late. - Yeah.
He's so smart.
I was having visions of Peter Ramsey's Emotion Machine.
Yeah.
This is another great piece of cinematography,
of the walk that goes through, um, different backgrounds.
Art department, take a bow.
Art department and animation because those guys, like...
That's the beauty of this medium,
is that you can just animate that guy
and drop different backgrounds behind him and it's seamless.
- Yeah. - Yeah.
Who painted those backgrounds?
Dave Bleich was the first.
- Those were his color keys. - Wow. The great Dave Bleich.
Sweetest guy, too.
Sweet man. New Orleanian.
And we haven't heard from him.
And you know I wouldn't reach out if this wasn't important.
Hope you're good.
Brian Tyree Henry being really sensitive and, uh,
communicating so much emotion.
With very few words.
One of the last shots finaled.
We reanimated that note I don't know how many times.
So many drafts of that letter, for goodness' sakes.
- It kept changing. - Yep.
This was actually one of the earlier sequences in production too.
We only did the dark scenes first because they were easier to light.
Yep, yep.
Hiding us not quite sure how to... integrate everything.
But...
That's very clever to watch Miles disappear in that reflection of the TV.
I'm gonna call out Daniel Pemberton's, uh, score again
with this motif he came up with for the Prowler, that sort of...
- The Prowler theme is effective. - Just really kind of haunts you.
I love that, like, I've heard many different people guess
what that sound is, and it's always, you know, feline, you know, "Jaguar..."
- Elephant. - But it's an elephant.
And it's hilarious to think that it can be that scary.
I mean, elephants will mess you up.
Oh, yeah. Absolutely.
I was on a safari, charged by an elephant,
and it was terrifying.
Absolutely terrifying.
Good thing you could turn invisible.
Yeah.
And it wasn't your uncle.
I'm very impressed with you guys,
that you made that reveal work.
- People gasp. - They do!
- They love it. They love it. - They do now.
- You guys hid the ball perfectly. - Just enough.
Thermal enhancement.
Yeah, this is one of my favorite, just, run of shots.
Just this whole thing, it's just...
- Very, very engaging. - Yeah.
Beautiful treatment of the light and, uh, color in this sequence, too.
If I was Prowler, I would've hit the thermal enhancement
when I was in the apartment, I'm just...
- Yeah. - I mean...
- He did! - He did?
No. No, he didn't. Not until he looked out the window.
- Yes, but in the apartment... - He would've seen Miles.
Yes, we were in his, um, in his vision, though.
I think the thermal enhancement is real expensive.
This is crazy.
He only has like ten minutes of it.
- This camerawork blows my mind. - This is nuts.
Do you remember, this was like... We asked the layout department, like,
"Is there any way you could make this sequence a little more exciting
and feel more like a proper action movie?"
- Look at that. - And then this came back.
I mean, it was a lot of back and forth,
but yes, pretty amazing.
This is a lot of people working at 110 percent and really just into it.
One of my favorite things about this is every department is killing it.
- Oh, yeah. Definitely. - Right?
It's like the music, the mix, the lighting, the colorist.
Our colorist Natasha exaggerated some of those oranges in an amazing way.
- Love this track. - We tried like 15,000 songs here.
One cool thing about Peni is that she's actually a CG model
that has been rendered in an anime style.
Watch Peni.
Watch that.
Oh, my gosh. With her little roller shoes?
- Yeah. - Give me a break.
That was, "This shot's not long enough
to get her all the way from the kitchen to the couch."
Is that why?
That's 100 percent why.
It was like, "Put those little wheelies on there."
I didn't even notice it until the guys, uh, put the sound of the roll.
And then we had something else on the mix stage that was kind of loud.
And when we turned it down, you heard that for the first time.
And everybody started laughing super hard the minute they saw the shot.
Another sequence that went through...
Oh, boy.
Who knows how many versions it was.
I'd say this thing almost didn't end up in the movie.
It was close to being gone.
I do want to call out, too, that, uh...
Doc Ock says that her friends call her Liv.
- And then Aunt May calls her Liv. - Yeah.
I don't know if you remember there was,
like a long time ago in the first draft, Phil,
there was this idea that Doc Ock, who at one point was a male,
but had... was, you know, Peter was a grad student
under the tutelage of Doc Ock.
And so there was a familiarity between the two of them.
And now it kind of plays like, "Oh, they've had a lot of battles before."
- Exactly. - And Aunt May knows about them.
Which I like, I like that she's so...
- Yeah. She's in it. - Such a badass.
This sequence used to be more of like a slapstick thing
about them just messing up the house, and they're kind of messing up.
But we found that it really needed to show everybody.
Like, this is our first chance getting to see the Spider-Team fight together.
- And they needed to all be really good. - Yeah.
I mean, our animators, I will say these shots took them so long.
I mean, can you imagine what... Just think.
Look how many characters are in every shot.
There's not a space in that frame that's not designed and moving and dynamic.
It really is, uh, a preposterous amount of work.
- It's more work than it even looks like. - Yes. So true.
You gotta go, man.
Yeah, just the choreography is insane on this thing.
- Super fun. - Gwen looks so cool.
That stuff was added pretty late
just to make sure you got to see Gwen doing something cool.
Yep.
No shortage of Gwen Stacy being cool in this movie.
This shot. When we got this back, it blew my mind.
I was just like, okay, we're, like, the Prowler is horrifying.
- Yeah. - Yeah, he's...
Yeah, and this is a really naturalistically shot and lit sequence
that's meant to be an emotional scene, basically, between these two guys.
- Yeah. - Yeah, it gets really real.
Can I just say that the table pushing into Miles,
that was something my brother...
My older brother and I were in a fight when we were kids, and he did that to me.
No way!
- One hundred percent. - I didn't know that.
Miles?
Uncle Aaron.
This is a really sweet scene.
Another great Shameik and Mahershala moment.
Please, Uncle Aaron.
- I love that we shut up for this. - I know.
- Have to be reverent. - Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, I just hope that, those of you listening,
you appreciate how challenging this is for an animation team
to pull off this emotionality and subtlety.
That little look 'cause he knows what's coming.
Just a lot of attention to what's going on
behind these characters' eyes.
Get out of here!
- We're all kind of gripped. - It's crazy.
I know, it works!
We're supposed to be talking about,
giving interesting anecdotes here, you guys, come on.
- All right. - It was so cold that day.
This is another, uh, I think, beautifully lit scene,
where you can have that soft, glowing white light in the background.
I mean, so much of the movie is backlit,
and then, you know, we kept asking folks to turn off the studio lights
and let the natural light bounce back onto the characters.
Mahershala's...
I gotta jump in with Mahershala's performance.
This was, I think, the first session we did with him.
- It was. - And, man, he's a method actor.
So, in his death scene, it was like he was really dying.
I think the first day he did it twice. And he was sideways.
Like, you know, because in a booth, you still need, the mic still needs...
He needs to still be on access to the mic
so we can pick it all up, but it was physical.
And then just, you know, the animators, the performance they did.
But especially here, like, we gave the animators the freedom.
We said, like, "You can make Miles unattractive."
- Meaning, like... - He can ugly cry.
He can ugly cry because this is just raw,
and, like, it feels so emotional to me.
We can... We probably should shout out to Shiyoon Kim,
who designed these characters in a way
that allowed for a lot of expressiveness and flexibility.
They're such appealing-looking characters.
But they also aren't stiff,
the way that the animators were able to get a lot of personality in.
This was always...
This was in the first draft of the script, this whole, this little interaction
between brothers and son and nephew.
And it was always...
I think, from day one, we knew it was going to be a very moving moment.
Great sound work here. It goes quiet.
One of the things that happened in the mix,
first time in Lord and Miller's career,
is we started turning things quieter.
All units...
Yeah, it's like there's so much, uh, difference
between the big, loud spectacle action stuff
and the really, really intimate moments here.
And it makes a nice push-pull for the whole movie.
- Good dynamics. - Mm-hmm.
Rhythm and release.
Just, you know, your average tantrum
from an emotional 13-, 14-year-old.
Convenient page it turned open to.
- This moment cracks me up. - Always.
It's like right when you need a kind of a lighter thing.
That was an animator named Jabari
who just killed, just, like, finally made that moment.
It's like a one-shot transition from deep emotion and regret and pain,
and then we said, like, "Hey, you're gonna lose...
He's gonna throw the one thing out that really represents his uncle,
yet it's gonna come flying back in."
And it, I mean, it was hard to make that shot work.
And it's a great statement, a story statement, of, like,
you can't lose the things that, you know, make up your past, yeah.
This line used to be a really silly line from Ham, which was,
"It was my Uncle Frankfurter, who was electrocuted.
He smelled so delicious."
And it always got a huge laugh.
But it really took you out of the moment of the scene, uh,
which needed to feel, like, personal and true.
Also, Ham's, like, appeal in the movie took a dive because of that.
He was really killing the vibe here.
Well, I think people resisted him more in that version of the movie
where he'd only had this one level of being ridiculous.
And now in the movie, he's, you know, he's brave sometimes,
he's sweet sometimes, and he's a more rounded-out character.
The goal was to try and make him the same kind of Spider-Person
as every other one in there.
Great shot. This is one of my favorite parts of the whole movie.
The stylization of the city outside the window.
I think always, whenever someone's out the window,
they want to push it as graphic as possible.
It's really, really beautiful.
And the light here is just magnificent.
- Yeah. Yeah. - Mm-hmm.
And there's some really, really great acting.
There are moments here that we kept trying to cut for pace,
but there was such great acting and performance from the animators
that it demanded to stay in the film.
Hold on. My favorite shot in the movie's coming up.
It's not this. It's a Miles reaction shot.
Yeah. When he turns with the pouty lip?
- This one. - That one.
- Yeah, that's a good one. - Which is well-observed.
Let me make him pay.
- Miles, you're gonna get yourself killed. - But I'm ready.
I promise!
Then venom-strike me right now.
Or turn invisible on command so you can get past me.
This is just such a... I don't know.
I'm so impressed with this scene
and the ideas underneath all of it.
You know? That they're putting this guy on the bench.
Yeah.
And that they're doing it with kindness and sympathy for him,
but they don't have a choice.
I just... I can call it out 'cause I had nothing to do with those ideas.
You won't. It's a leap of faith.
That's all it is, Miles.
A leap of faith.
That's a line that used to be...
It used to be in another scene on a billboard earlier in the movie.
The legendary billboard.
It's somewhere else on this Blu-ray, probably.
Absolutely.
But it was such an important line that we needed to put it in this scene
when we cut the other scene.
- More time-lapse, guys. - Yep. Sorry, Imageworks.
I'm about to pitch TIME-LAPSE: The Movie.
Should I not pitch it to Imageworks?
No, pitch it, for sure. It's just going to be really short.
And now this scene coming up here
feels like the emotional crux of the whole film.
Miles.
Miles, it's your dad.
Please open the door.
- Just gorgeous. - Lucky to get to... Yeah.
Tell you what, that Brian Tyree Henry, there's a reason why he's in every movie.
- Legally now, he's... - Yes.
It's 'cause he's got the chops.
The man deserves everything he gets. He's incredible.
Yeah, and when he saw this, uh, scene,
like, we... we were recording him, and we played it for him
in its sort of rough performance...
I don't know if it was fully lit, I think it was just animation, but, um...
he got the movie.
Like, it made such an impression on him,
with the performance, his voice plus the acting and the camerawork,
what we were able to build.
He was very happy to come in and pick any lines up for us
and just keep working.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, I remember when we were... working on the shots in layout for this,
and the idea of...
having them be on the thirds to start,
and then them coming closer,
and finally ending with the one split-screen shot at the end.
And Jefferson crosses the center, which I think is just really interesting.
They start out on opposite sides of the screen.
- He makes the first move. - Exactly.
You guys just really... I mean, everything here is working together,
the staging and the animation and the lighting.
Now Miles is creeping towards the center.
It's even the sound when he can hear Miles
bump against the door with his head.
You know that Jeff knows that he's closer and right there.
Now Miles gets to be in the center.
- Anyway, nice job, guys! - Yeah, good stuff.
Watch how the color escalates.
This happened in the DI suite over the course of this shot.
He goes from being in this naturalistic world
to being in a heightened kind of comic book reality.
DI is digital intermediate,
a final stage where you can spin the dials on colors
and different things in the shot.
- Thank you, Rodney. - Yeah.
A little piece of hand-drawn there,
if you want to freeze-frame it.
Oh, Ganke.
There was a version of this movie where there was a lot more Ganke.
- That was a journey in itself. - Unfortunately.
- Yeah. - Yes.
But it's amazing to me to see Miles transformed by his father.
- Yeah, and it feels earned. - And his willingness to... It does.
In an earlier version of that scene,
Aunt May gave him a version of that speech, which was nice.
- But, uh, it needed to be dad. - Yeah.
Oh, I have to tell you guys, um,
so after our premiere, my 9-year-old son asked me this:
"So, Papa, you know Miles, like,
he spray-paints one of those suits and it becomes his suit.
Super cool, Papa, but it shouldn't fit him.
It's way bigger."
That's good.
Did he have to wait a few hours for it to dry so it didn't...
Well, we cut out the sequence
where Aunt May sewed it tighter and altered it.
That's exactly what I told him.
And they had, like, the hair dryer express drying it.
"Your friends are in danger." "Well, just let me let it dry first."
I'll tell you what. Spray paint? Five minutes and you're dry.
- There you go. - For sure.
But it was, literally, I was like,
"Well, you know what, Luca? We actually cut out a shot
of Aunt May sewing and altering the suit.
We just implied that that happened."
She pre-altered it. She knew he was coming.
Said, "Took you long enough." So it all happened in advance.
The shot we just saw of Miles falling and everything kind of slows down
was written in the script, I think in the first draft of the script,
and I always appreciated that it was called out by Phil
that he was falling and rising at the same time.
I always thought that was a cool detail.
- And it is that shot. - It made the movie.
The rare thing that winds up, that goes from the stage directions
all the way through the production onto the screen.
And this, like, this sequence, um, also had a little evolution
where we, um... it used to end with him getting hit by a truck.
- Yeah. - And, uh...
But it really felt like it was time for Miles to get a big victory here.
A really big victory, yeah.
- And it feels so good. - And now people, like, applaud.
- Yeah. - Yeah.
- And it's interesting... - It's like... Go ahead, Peter.
I was going to say the way the movie used to unfold,
it felt wrong for Miles to kind of feel like he arrived here.
But the way the last part of the movie is,
he's still got a ways to go, so it worked then.
There's a general attitude with this movie of,
"How can we do things differently?" That was a case where we were like,
"What if we didn't have the audience feel really good in this moment?
What if we had them feel really bad?"
"Right when they wanna feel good,
what if we just made 'em feel terrible?"
- Let's poke them in the eye. - I think in early drafts,
we just were like, "Miles is losing, losing, and falling short
the whole movie until the very end."
And when we put that up, we realized that
you needed to see him slowly winning and winning and winning
until he won even bigger at the end.
Yeah. Yeah, we definitely did.
Hold on. Get a load of how the waiters are dressed.
It's in poor taste, but...
- This is Rodney's pitch. - Yeah.
What? This?
That they were all wearing Spider-Man masks.
It's kinda connected to a setup that's not in the movie anymore,
you know, a setup where Fisk is a little more...
Running for mayor.
Yeah, that Fisk, uh, runs charities for Spider-Man and so on.
I'm sorry, I'll be right back.
He was a mayoral candidate for about six months.
It will take one second. Let me just...
- Hello. - Oh, wow.
Jake just making this stuff sing.
- And Zoë Kravitz. Mary Jane Parker. - Zoë Kravitz.
A smooth and warm voice.
This is a good example of, Phil, what you're talking about,
where this is a scene that was on the chopping block
and wasn't quite working for a long time.
And then by adding this interaction
and making it about Peter and MJ and something real,
all of a sudden the scene was, uh... was worth it.
It was.
It becomes necessary to know what Peter's giving up
by sacrificing himself.
Absolutely. And it lasts just long enough.
Because we learned that if you stay away from Miles for too long...
- Danny Dimian! - Yes, Danny and Josh there,
then we lose sort of our connection to the movie in a bigger way.
But at this point, we care enough about Peter
to want him to get back to MJ too.
But there was a whole kitchen scene that happened in there,
that was actually animated, with Tombstone and the pig under...
- I mean, it was very funny. - It was great.
And I guess that will also be on the Blu-ray somewhere else.
Because we got a bigger dose of Tombstone, which is really hilarious.
- Oh, he's wonderful. - The great Marvin Jones.
- A great voice performance. - Yes.
One of the things that we noticed is that, by having all that material,
when you got deeper into this sequence, you just were so tired.
- Yeah. - Mm-hmm.
Just, pace required it to go, even though we loved it.
And I think being away from Miles for that long was too much to ask.
And we're about to ask the audience a lot right here.
Kingpin's goal, uh...
Kingpin's, uh, backstory with his family
and using the collider to try to bring his family back
was a Brian Michael Bendis pitch, I believe, from several years ago...
that then appeared in, um, the Miles comic.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, and this whole...
The whole third act kind of mega-battle that we're about to get into
was yet another one of those sequences
which went through iteration after iteration,
hundreds of hours of storyboarding.
- Editorial time. - Editorial layout.
I remember the five of us in a conference room
just making a mess of several whiteboards about just where everybody is
and what the goal is and what they're trying to get to.
And it just, like, got... People came in and it would look like A Beautiful Mind.
And it looked like A Beautiful Mind in the storyboards
at every stage until the very, very end.
It was really hard to visualize with, like...
until it was lit and rendered, really.
A lot of this was, like, Peter and Vic in the edit suite.
- Oh, God. Hi, Vic! - Working out stuff and then...
Hi, Vic! And then... Right? And then, Bob, you in animation, like, trying to...
Yeah, I mean, it was, uh... literally, there were parallel tracks
on these two, three sequences.
Just because also of time of where we were.
We should also call out Bob Fisher and the amazing work he did
that make things like this, that are incomprehensible, comprehensible.
And, uh, I think this movie required a preposterous amount of editing.
His whole team...
The sheer volume that everybody in that edit suite went through,
in terms of drawings and dialogue...
You know, we make it really hard on them.
We record a lot of takes and a lot of variations.
And, um, they just deserve all heaps of praise.
Andrew Leviton worked a lot on this sequence, trying to get it to...
The computers, you know, the servers that held the movie
were moving slow by the end of the shoot.
And we had the best computers, right?
- Yeah, actually, at a certain point... - I think Avid couldn't take it.
And I think Imageworks actually, at a certain point,
I think we overloaded their server.
Uh, yeah.
There was a moment where they were afraid
that the movie was going to break their machine.
- Which was our whole idea. - Yeah.
Our whole approach was how do we break these pipes that make the movie.
And so the multiple universes colliding together in this one room...
- Applesauce. - Applesauce,
was an idea that was, uh, from the very beginning of the first...
from the outline that Phil wrote.
And then, like,
a lot of the great conceptual art came from Patrick O'Keefe,
who did, like, a really deep dive of like 100 tons of images.
And it was one of the only times I can remember ever saying,
"Okay, you've gone too far."
It was, like, there was, like, one brand of the thing,
where I was like, "I don't get this."
Uh, and so that one, like...
A few of the drawings that were somehow even more insane than this...
What you're saying, Chris, is there's a version that's even crazier.
Yes.
That was literally the only time I can remember going,
"Okay, guys, you've done it. You've really... You've broken it."
But... it's really just gorgeous.
The colors in this thing are insane.
- I love it so much. - This shot.
The series of Peni, like when we come back to Peni in a minute with the robot, and...
Yeah, there's just so much beauty in this. I mean, you know, this is...
Dave Bleich did, like, the first sort of color key pass on this to go over.
And then Patrick took that
and sort of designed a bunch of these possible...
what we called the, like, asterisks of buildings and things.
And then Justin and Dean came in and like, I mean,
they were painting frame-by-frame color keys for this.
Yeah. I'm sure there's filmmakers watching this.
So I would say there is a learnable lesson from this sequence,
which is if you want to put something super crazy in your movie,
wait until the very end
when a lot of money has been spent on your movie
and your release date is three to four months away
and they literally can't stop you, or else they have no movie.
- Right. Well, a really important thing... - He webs a turntable.
- Just so you know. - That is true.
It's, like, really important that you have a complete understanding
of the relationships here.
- Yeah. - Right.
And then in this whole sequence about, like, the goal,
once we get to the button,
and we need to know where the button is and where he's got to get to.
- And when the rest of the universe is... - Sure.
I didn't teach him that. And you definitely didn't.
These shots right here are... This little run...
And I think there's a performance between her and Noir
that really is heart-wrenching and really supportive.
- This little... Here. - Yeah.
I think you were just saying this, but...
As this went through iterations, in the end it really got stripped down
to almost exclusively emotional beats
and Miles and Gwen and Peter beats, and...
everything else fell out.
The movie did that consistently, like,
through the entire process.
Every time we put things that weren't... that weren't, uh, important
or felt like they came from an authentic character place,
it just bounced them out of the movie.
It did.
I mean, the colors...
Just, like, you can't believe what we got away with.
It's mind-blowing.
And it's also kind of, like, joyous but awe-inspiring at the same time.
Which is... Man, it's a...
Yeah, and you get a flash of each different dimension
that they're going home to when they go back into the portal right here.
One thing I'll say is that
if it sounds like we're, like, talking up our own movie,
part of that is because this movie required such a huge team
and was so by the seat of its pants that there are a bunch of things,
I'll speak for myself, there's a bunch of things that I watch almost as a spectator,
even though I was involved in their production.
Same here. Same here. It's...
You end up applauding the work of the team 'cause it's so inspiring.
It makes me cry.
You can't hear this, uh, 'cause tears don't make noise,
but I well up when I think about what everybody put on screen
and how special it all is and how collaborative everyone was.
- Like that moment there. - Beautiful.
Where Hailee calls him Spider-Man.
First of all, it's great acting by both of them.
But also, that choice, which went through a lot of iterations
about, like, what's the end of their relationship,
the fact that she gives him the respect of calling him Spider-Man
instead of giving him a little kiss on the cheek or something,
it ended up being something that makes me kind of well up
every time I see it.
Oh, man.
Just to, like, keep talking about what you were talking about, Phil,
just what people gave to this movie,
every single person on this movie made the movie
very important in their life.
And that's why, uh, I think all the different aspects of it are
at a place where you kind of maybe haven't seen them in animation before
because everyone realized what a special treat it was
to get to make this.
Even though it was hard, you know?
Yeah, it's fitting for the movie
because it's on story and on theme for the movie
that we and you guys all elevated each other's best qualities
instead of trying to sit on one another.
Yeah.
There was a little sitting on one another.
Like, literally, yes.
And it's just... It's so damn Marvel Comics.
Look at this stuff, man, it's...
It's insane.
Also I love that it gets so quiet there,
even though crazy things are happening.
Bob Persichetti calls glass fragments,
like you're about to see, "Dorito chips."
Dorito chips. It was like, we had to come up with...
- They're all triangles. - They're just triangles.
It's like anytime things looked too real, they jumped out at us, and so...
I'm going to shout out Daniel Pemberton again.
- I love this part of the score. - Yeah, the hero score.
That's great.
One cool thing about this train is that, in the interior of the train,
there is a version from all five dimensions.
There's, like, a Peni Parker version.
There's an old-timey Noir version that flashes.
It flash-frames if you go through it.
You know, there's a Gwen version. Oh, you saw it there really quickly.
And so, especially as it passes through the beam, it, uh...
You get to see five different versions of the train existing at once.
And here's an idea that, you know, that is... felt so right,
but was also very hard to convince, sort of, other people
that we needed it for Kingpin.
But it was this idea of just repeating mistakes
and, no matter what,
he was going to continue repeating the same mistakes over and over.
He's still who he is.
You're not stopping this. Not today.
I am stopping this. Right now!
Ah, and the craziness here. Look at that!
That was one of the first shots. Sorry, Peter.
But that was one of the first shots of the climax that we saw,
sort of, like, in a pretty decently formed version.
And we all screamed and cried.
Right. 'Cause you're also seeing it through Jefferson's eyes,
going like, "What the heck is this?"
- Yes. - It's amazing.
It was also my dream to have Kingpin head-butt Miles,
and it finally came true at the end.
I remember Paul Watling drawing some of that stuff.
- The great Paul Watling. Beautiful man. - Fantastic story artist.
The story team did a great job. Animation, layout.
Everybody just killing it here. Look at that.
- Kirby Dots going crazy. - Mm-hmm.
There's the goal!
This was another area that, for a long time, we...
the emotional resonance wasn't...
We didn't really have it in this last fight.
And at the very end, I think as Bob was taking it through anim,
and we had Liev's... some late Liev performance.
And just the way that this thing got built,
really, like, it so earned its place, and it became a real...
There's emotion in this fight now, in this sequence.
It means something.
Yeah, I mean,
we've been to a lot of really, you know, big places in this movie.
And this was just an intimate thing between two people, and it was...
Again, what you're seeing visually is just black enveloping the frame.
And we always pitched it like that,
that we were going to get to a place where there wasn't going to be much left.
And, um, here we are.
Each one of these characters is in a black costume
and then black surrounds them.
And yet you can still see what's happening.
Yeah.
A big part of what makes this work, I think, is, you know,
Curt Schulkey, one of our sound team, cut in a lot of breathing
and... just putting you in the head of these characters,
even though they're not saying anything.
I'm about to call out Irina Cuadra
because she actually was the first person to say,
- "What if he shoulder touched him?" - Oh, really? No way!
- It was Irina. - Wow!
Yep.
I didn't know that. That's awesome.
That was during, like when the first, like, pass on this with Miguel.
I was trying to remember who that was. It was Irina.
I remember people wanting to cut this. The shoulder touch here.
- Who wanted to cut this? - People did, and people...
- People did. - No names in the street, man.
All right.
But... I remember kind of feeling like, "Oh, my God."
I was just like, "You're lucky you got the shoulder touch in," like...
The fact that you could be able pay off a setup
that wasn't even intended as a setup.
Yeah, it's just a wonderful character comedic moment
that just, you know...
- Hang on to that. - And then this madness, just...
- Madness. - Yeah.
- Beautiful madness. - Then this.
"How long can it be? Let's make it way too long!" Right?
- I know. - Let's make it way too long.
Like, "Wait, wait, it's still going?"
Oh, no, we're just getting started.
I think this shot is gonna change some young lives.
Yeah, for sure. There's a lot of...
A little bit of psychedelia for the young.
There's a lot of potential in the universes.
No shortage of psychedelia.
You can see the FLDSMDFR right there,
which is the food machine from Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs.
Anvil.
So the anvil was in Ham's pocket.
- Is that the idea? - Yes.
- In hammer space. - Hammer space.
Yeah, it's in hammer space. But it was sticking out obviously.
Can I write Into the Hammer Space?
- Sure. - It's an all time-lapse film.
A lot of attention going to making that final explosion little enough...
- Yes. - Mm-hmm.
To feel like something new had happened.
Yeah, different from the first one.
Yeah, and we also had, I mean... Sorry, Chris.
I was going to say, like, we had always had the same explosion just cut in...
as all those glitch explosions.
And even Danny and everybody was, like, confused.
And we were like, "No, no, it's a practical explosion, and it's small."
And I think even Tom Rothman was like, "Oh, okay."
That was probably our bad.
We should have been a little clearer with that in the rough reels.
Miles? Miles? Are you okay?
Yeah, I'm okay.
You're probably busy...
What'd you think about working with Tom Rothman?
I will say it was... I'll say it was Tom,
Tom was the first one to say
it shouldn't be Aunt May at the door, it should be the dad.
And we all sort of slapped our foreheads, going...
"That's absolutely right. Absolutely right."
There's a reason he is in that position.
- Mm-hmm. - He's made a few movies.
He also produced Down by Law. So, respect.
- Really? That's awesome. - I didn't know that.
That's how you know he's a freak.
So he can't ever play that, like, studio card ever again.
And, uh, we should also call out the Sony Pictures Animation studio people,
especially Kristine Belson,
who, like, really believed in the movie from the very beginning
and fought for it.
And Pam Marsden, who helped us actually get the thing made.
Christina Steinberg, our producer.
My old buddy from Rise of the Guardians,
who was, like, in the trenches every day.
Can I just say this moment here was...
When we had this moment in storyboard form about...
Well, we're recording this in December 2018,
so a year ago, was the moment when everybody went,
"Oh, yes."
Like, this is... No matter what, we have to get to the hug
and to the disguised voice and the "I love you."
Yeah, it's crazy, in a movie where you think
that the killer apps are all these cool action moments,
ultimately, the thing that makes it work are the relationships, the small stuff.
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
I like this, uh, music cue Daniel did.
Pemberton just...
He did a really amazing job,
how it seamlessly goes through the whole soundtrack
with a bunch of songs...
with Republic Records, and made it have its own vibe,
feeling like Miles's playlist meets Aaron's playlist, uh,
meets a superhero movie all woven together.
Yeah, I mean, it's hard to identify the points
where the songs end and the score begins.
And it's because they often overlap in a really special way.
It's also worth pointing out that Daniel Pemberton was operating
from the assumption that the hero's name,
you should be able to sing it to the main musical motif.
That's right.
We're not gonna sing it right now for legal reasons.
- We're not. - But you also can.
Mm-hmm.
This is a really sweet late addition.
- Wanted to see the... - Shameik brought us home here.
And Peter B. is gonna be happy after all.
- Yeah. - That nice bass drum.
- I think another Tom idea. - Taking a leap of faith.
Who was the layout artist who did these shots
that we all just gasped when they came in?
I think it was Eid.
I don't want to mis-credit it, but I think it was.
I remember being in review, going like, "Whoa!"
Yeah, and all this animation here
was done by, um, Daniel Han,
who just got nominated for an Annie
for these performances and a bunch of other incredible ones.
I love that the movie, like, Miles's story starts and ends
in his bedroom by himself.
- Mm-hmm. - Just another teenager.
- Or is he by himself? - It's an intimate story, yeah.
Or is he?
- Who was that? - Hooray!
Amazing. And it may not end?
We could do a whole other commentary
and say completely different things.
- It's true. - Probably four other ones.
We should do an alternate universe commentary.
Anyway, Alma Mater, who has done every main-on-end
for every movie we've done...
- Except for Cloudy. - Oh, that's right.
Yeah, Cloudy, that was an in-house one.
They did both Jump Streets and Lego Movie, one and two,
and always do an amazing job of adding a bunch of great details and artistry.
I think we really need to, um, say a giant thank you
to the chaperones, the Sherpas of Spider-Man,
the people who have carried this character and franchise into the cinema,
which would be Amy Pascal and Avi Arad.
Oh, yeah.
The godfather and godmother of this movie.
Yeah, they came to us in 2014
and asked about doing an animated Spider-Man.
And after thinking about it,
we got really excited about the opportunities.
And they believed in it and us the whole time.
And Amy is such a very smart, emotional storyteller
and would always come back to, like,
"What are we trying to say with this movie?
What are we trying to say with this scene?"
And she would, like, very incisively know
when we had scenes that weren't working and why they weren't working.
Both Amy and Avi had such a long-standing relationship
with Spider-Man and Peter Parker being Spider-Man.
That they... It was like we were showing a new child to them, you know?
So I think they had to learn to accept the new child, and they did.
And then they embraced Miles in a way
that they became the biggest champions for him in this movie.
I remember at the premiere pulling Avi aside and saying,
"Thank you for believing in this movie."
Justin.
Justin K. Thompson. Danny Dimian, wow.
Those two gentlemen right there really were the first ones on board
going like... wanting to push the style.
When we said, "Let's make it feel like walking into the pages of a comic book,"
they were like, "Let's do it," and Danny was like,
"We don't quite know how to do it yet, but I am so excited to make it happen."
And they really did.
And Christian helped them, you know, make it all happen.
I mean, there was just... Everybody went through the crucible on this movie.
Yeah.
And had to, like, dig deep and face their weak spots.
And, uh, you know, at the end of the day, like,
we all challenged each other and all lifted each other up.
Yeah, and I think even, part of it, for Danny especially,
just was a fear of doing, um...
Not that he was afraid to try and do things different.
It was a fear of, sort of,
creating something that didn't live within the normal parameters of cinema rules.
And we did a lot of that.
And I think he was afraid of just doing it because of what might happen.
- It was a leap of faith. - Yeah, it was.
And he made it, like a champion.
- Yeah. - Yeah, you all did.
- Stan Lee. - And now a moment of silence.
Oh, yeah. Gosh.
We can't talk enough about what Stan Lee and Steve Ditko did
for all of us as young people.
And, you know, the ideas in this movie start with them
and the idea, you know, that a superhero could be anyone,
and that a superhero might have problems and was just like us.
And, you know, you can see what came out of that.
An entire generation, multiple generations of people moved by that thought,
replicated thousands of times over many different characters,
many books, movies.
It's a really powerful idea.
Yeah, especially with the Spider-Man myth
just being such a resonant thing to teenagers.
You know, to kids feeling alone,
feeling like... they're isolated, and they have...
They're fighting, you know, these things
that are maybe out of their control,
but are outsized,
but are really just part of growing up and finding your own identity
and becoming, you know, a confident older teen
who can chart a path into adulthood.
But it just so happens that they also have superpowers.
Well, you're your own champion.
I think that's the idea. This is a story of empowerment.
A champion is not coming from outside of you
to come and save you, right?
- That's right. - It's your job.
And it's a pretty powerful idea that can wrap around, uh,
Peter Parker in 1961 or 1963, I can't remember which one it was,
when he was originally introduced,
and then all these years later with Miles Morales,
a totally different kid in just about every way,
but the myth is still as powerful and meaningful
and hits all the same notes.
I mean, that's... universal.
I'd just like to point out that every name you see right now,
we've seen them cry.
We made them cry.
We made them cry, and every name you see right now has yelled at us.
But it's a great Muhammad Ali quote.
He used to say how much he hated working out,
but then he would tell himself,
"Suffer today, and live the rest of your life as a champion."
- So, there you go, guys. - There you go.
- Wow. - You did it.
Yeah, I mean, this movie had a record number of animators on it
because, as discussed earlier,
it takes four times as long to animate a second of animation on this thing.
So the crew was larger than any other crew
that I believe has ever been assembled for a movie.
Everybody worked so hard.
Yeah, and there's some... I was just gonna, like, do one...
I mentioned Josh earlier, who was our head of animation.
But there was another guy, Humberto Rosa,
who was one of our leads, who was on super early...
and helped define, sort of, a couple, you know, key characters.
But also, he's the person who figured out, on his own time,
how we can do... animate on twos and do camera moves.
He's the guy who figured it out, so I just wanna...
I didn't know Humberto did that.
- It's kind of unbelievable. - Fantastic.
- Really hard to do. - Yeah.
'Cause... yeah.
Especially when their feet are touching the ground and you see the point.
Yeah, there's these countermoves, and characters stick to the camera,
but then they don't stick to the camera, and he wrote this whole program for it.
- And the guy's, like, a genius. - Fantastic. And Julie.
And Julie, yeah.
Julie, who...
Our first performances of Gwen and Miles
that actually, like, really stuck
and started, like, showing us who those characters were...
Uh, Julie just...
Yeah, I think that was, like...
Call out Geoff Rubay, whose name's here.
Geoff Rubay, Mike Semanick, Tony Lamberti,
like, what an amazing sound team.
- Holy crap. - Astounding.
This movie...
Like every other department, was trying to do
a whole bunch of new groundbreaking work in sound.
And they really made it sensitive and exciting.
Oh, Katie Greathouse we should also mention.
- Katie and Kier, right? - And Kier. Yeah.
Yeah, like, amazing.
We've made a couple movies with them,
and, uh, Katie's just the best music editor that there is.
She was... really amazing.
- And is really amazing. - Yes.
Just to circle back, I mean,
the stuff that Julie was doing really informed
how we started to write the movie.
I was gonna try and throw that to you
because... a lot of the space between lines
became really informative for Rodney and Phil in scripting.
There's Mike Moon's name.
There it is.
Mike Moon we've known for, all of us,
a really long time in animation.
International man of mystery.
Yeah, and an animation genius, and a genius artist who decided to...
hang up his pencil and become an executive.
I don't know if I've ever heard a story quite like his.
And, uh, he's done a lot for animation
because he knows, you know, what's great,
and he's elevated a lot of talented people, um,
and given them the opportunity to make great work.
Yeah, so the spirit in staffing, you know,
and various things, uh, behind this movie,
a lot of it Mike Moon had a formative effect on.
He's got a great... I mean, he pulls together...
He has such... He knows everyone.
And he pulls together incredible teams of creative people.
Now, all the incredible... the crew who worked so hard, um,
all the departments, uh,
somewhere near the eye of the storm was Christina Steinberg,
who I got to work with on my movie Rise of the Guardians several years back,
and she's just, uh, she's just like an iron woman.
She was in there every day in editorial, at the sound mix,
duking it out with whoever needed to be duked out.
And really creating a space for us
to really be able to push forward creatively
and, um, take things to the limit.
She was always there.
And, uh, I think all of us realized how much of an asset
and, uh, just a supporter and a cheerleader...
I'm making her sound like...
Yeah, those aren't the right words. She was a force. You know?
She was a full partner, and she was incredible.
- Oh, guys, what happened here? - What? Oh, hello.
We left a little bit of movie at the end of the movie.
- Talk about late additions. - This is Lyla.
We thought of this like two months ago.
Yeah, from whenever you're hearing this,
it's two months ago when we thought of it.
Pretty much. We wanted to get Miguel in there one way or another
and sort of show the opportunities of where the multiverse could go.
- Oh, man. - Look at that.
- Jorma Taccone. - So cool.
- Bringing home the movie. - Yes. Indeed.
Earth '67.
Earth-67, and if you know what that is,
you're so happy right there.
Yes.
How... I love the multiverse, how it pans in.
Unbelievable.
And this shot was the very last thing to be animated in the movie.
And we actually looked it up. This is the world's most expensive dumb joke.
Look at the...
They didn't finish cleaning the cel on that close-up of Spider-Man.
- I love it. - Signing off.
- Thanks, gang. We done did it. - It's been a pleasure, gents.
Thanks for listening.
- Thanks. - Get some fresh air.
- Bye. - Bye.