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(1/10) I was asked recently - "What was the most difficult shot you animated on Spiderverse?" My answer came spilling out and surprised me actually... A thread...
(2/10) If you'd asked me the same question 2 years ago, no doubt I would've explained the long and complicated path that this shot took to completion:
(3/10) Or I may have told the story about how we didn’t have a Lizard model so I had to completely re-shape the Green Goblin so that he could pass as a shadow puppet in Gwen’s flashback:
(4/10) But I suppose as the years passed and I digested my experiences working on the film, it was this run of shots - Jeff, Miles, & Aaron in the alleyway - that suddenly came leaping to mind when I was asked the question this time:
(5/10) As co-dir. Bob Persichetti expressed to me: Miles's life is falling apart. He's been betrayed by Aaron - his longtime idol, & w/o reconciliation, he’s dead and Miles blames himself for it. On top of that his dad is about to find out that he’s Spiderman and blame him too.
(6/10) Actually, this moment was initially envisioned with Jeff’s gun aimed directly at Miles, but it was ultimately deemed to be too controversial and we decided to have the gun in the “high ready” position instead.
(7/10) Needless to say, it’s a devastating emotional load on Miles. And to try to put myself in his shoes, I dug back to when I lost my dad suddenly & unexpectedly just after college -- Remembering the crushing feeling of getting the midnight call to find out he was gone.
(8/10) It took around 3 months to animate these shots. Which was 3 months spent putting myself through my feelings of grief daily in the hopes that some of it would come through in Miles’s performance.
(9/10) If there was any bit of playfulness in this shot, it was disassembling Jeff’s gun and using it as a 'smear frame' when he turns around. Which of course ended up being buried in shadows, ha!
(10/10) So this was the hardest shot, not for its complexity or technical challenges, but for its emotional toll. All said tho, it was an honor to work with Miles in his moment of deep despair.
As my sup. put it, “It’s rare we get to work w/ this level of pathos in animation.”
As my sup. put it, “It’s rare we get to work w/ this level of pathos in animation.”
