Spider-Verse Artists Say Working on the Sequel Was ‘Death by a Thousand Paper Cuts’

Why don’t more animated movies look this good? According to people who worked on the sequel, Across the Spider-Verse, it’s because the working conditions required to produce such artistry are not sustainable.

Multiple Across the Spider-Verse crew members — ranging from artists to production executives who have worked anywhere from five to a dozen years in the animation business — describe the process of making the the $150 million Sony project as uniquely arduous, involving a relentless kind of revisionism that compelled approximately 100 artists to flee the movie before its completion.

While frequent major overhauls are standard operating procedure in animation (Pixar films can take between four and seven years to plot, animate, and render), those changes typically occur early on during development and storyboarding stages. But these Spider-Verse 2 crew members say they were asked to make alterations to already-approved animated sequences that created a backlog of work across multiple late-stage departments. Across the Spider-Verse was meant to debut in theaters in April of 2022, before it was postponed to October of that year and then June 2023 owing to what Entertainment Weekly reported as “pandemic-related delays.” However, the four crew members say animators who were hired in the spring of 2021 sat idle for anywhere from three to six months that year while Phil Lord tinkered with the movie in the layout stage, when the first 3-D representation of storyboards are created.

As a result, these individuals say, they were pushed to work more than 11 hours a day, seven days a week, for more than a year to make up for time lost and were forced back to the drawing board as many as five times to revise work during the final rendering stage.

"For animated movies, the majority of the trial-and-error process happens during writing and storyboarding. Not with fully completed animation. Phil’s mentality was, This change makes for a better movie, so why aren’t we doing it? It’s obviously been very expensive having to redo the same shot several times over and have every department touch it so many times. The changes in the writing would go through storyboarding. Then it gets to layout, then animation, then final layout, which is adjusting cameras and placements of things in the environment. Then there’s cloth and hair effects, which have to repeatedly be redone anytime there’s an animation change. The effects department also passes over the characters with ink lines and does all the crazy stuff like explosions, smoke, and water. And they work closely with lighting and compositing on all the color and visual treatments in this movie. Every pass is plugged into editing. Smaller changes tend to start with animation, and big story changes can involve more departments like visual development, modeling, rigging, and texture painting. These are a lot of artists affected by one change. Imagine an endless stream of them."

"Over 100 people left the project because they couldn’t take it anymore. But a lot stayed on just so they could make sure their work survived until the end — because if it gets changed, it’s no longer yours. I know people who were on the project for over a year who left, and now they have little to show for it because everything was changed. They went through the hell of the production and then got none of their work coming out the other side."

❤ Still months away, but every day it's getting closer :)! ❤ (yep I am excited and very happy we will get it this year! :)) Wahoo! (but yes let's be patient, just enjoy that it's coming :))❤)

Oh i got one for you this year~

Impmon, Rocking some Stilettos (really tall heel boots)

hes doing just FINE thankyou for asking

Shitty doodle requests closed, Happy Odaiba day!

Good morning, Mr. Flanagan! I am a big fan of your work. Currently doing a rewatch of Doctor Sleep (honestly my favorite film hands down) and there is a scene where Abra has been juiced by The Crow after he murders her father. Dan is doing his best to listen for her and we can hear a slew of voices while he tries to dial in. I was curious how those slew of voices were edited in? Was it just a collection of previous audio clips from your other work? My apologies if this is a random question; I am very passionate about film making and am always questioning/curious about the little details. Hope all is well. ☺️

We recorded those voices with a loop group during post production.

A loop group is a group of actors who provide all of the background vocals for the movie - if there's a restaurant scene, for example, none of the people in the restaurant can talk while we are filming, because we need to get the dialog of the main actors recorded clean. So later, a group of other actors stand at microphones and they perform the voices of everyone you see in that restaurant. For Doctor Sleep, our loop group worked for several days filling in the entire movie. Any time you see people in public, like when Dan is at the bar in the beginning of the movie, or when he is driving the train through the crowded park, our loop group is performing all of the other voices that you hear (even when you don't really notice other voices). For the scene you're talking about, when we were on set, Ewan just imagined he could hear voices - there was no sound at all while we were filming. And then, many months later, we wrote several options for the loop group actors to perform, and those actors provided all of the voices that Dan could hear.

Max Headroom looks like if Kryten from Red Dwarf and Ben Browder had a baby which was then Yassified in photoshop in post-production.

Flawless [Bogart]

© Andrea Passon / www.andreapasson.it

More Black and white Moth concept art, focusing on Siegfried and von Weiss. The main message I want to get across in this story is that victims often blame themselves for their misfortunes, we must blame the people who mistreated us and either defeat or escape them. Abusers with power will tell you that everything bad is your fault as they screw you over.

Please, I am BEGGING future filmmakers - don't make films **ONLY** in widescreen. It's annoying for the abled, but it's especially annoying for people who need captions &/or can only view a movie better in FULL SCREEN. If you want to make a version for IMAX that's cool too. That's a convo for your editors. You wanna place it on a streaming service? Give people both options - full & wide screen. But NEVER make the assumption that filming ONLY in widescreen is BEST.

guys. guys. guys.

this is the future of dubbing.

this blows my fucking mind

12 foot ladder link to article

oh yeah my favorite monster of monsters university, Spike Jacobs

To get work, the houses bid on a project; they are all trying to come in right under one another’s bids. With Marvel, the bids will typically come in quite a bit under, and Marvel is happy with that relationship, because it saves it money. But what ends up happening is that all Marvel projects tend to be understaffed. Where I would usually have a team of ten VFX artists on a non-Marvel movie, on one Marvel movie, I got two including myself. So every person is doing more work than they need to.

The other thing with Marvel is it’s famous for asking for lots of changes throughout the process. So you’re already overworked, but then Marvel’s asking for regular changes way in excess of what any other client does. And some of those changes are really major. Maybe a month or two before a movie comes out, Marvel will have us change the entire third act. It has really tight turnaround times. So yeah, it’s just not a great situation all around. One visual-effects house could not finish the number of shots and reshoots Marvel was asking for in time, so Marvel had to give my studio the work. Ever since, that house has effectively been blacklisted from getting Marvel work.

I remember going to a presentation by one of the other VFX houses about an early MCU movie, and people were talking about how they were getting “pixel-fucked.” That’s a term we use in the industry when the client will nitpick over every little pixel. Even if you never notice it. A client might say, “This is not exactly what I want,” and you keep working at it. But they have no idea what they want. So they’ll be like, “Can you just try this? Can you just try that?” They’ll want you to change an entire setting, an entire environment, pretty late in a movie.

The main problem is most of Marvel’s directors aren’t familiar with working with visual effects. A lot of them have just done little indies at the Sundance Film Festival and have never worked with VFX. They don’t know how to visualize something that’s not there yet, that’s not on set with them. So Marvel often starts asking for what we call “final renders.” As we’re working through a movie, we’ll send work-in-progress images that are not pretty but show where we’re at. Marvel often asks for them to be delivered at a much higher quality very early on, and that takes a lot of time. Marvel does that because its directors don’t know how to look at the rough images early on and make judgment calls. But that is the way the industry has to work. You can’t show something super pretty when the basics are still being fleshed out.

Ah, tonight's page. I'm sleep deprived, I'm surprised i got all the figure lines done. Scene from Ottoway vol 2, Edwin shares his bottle with Otto. What a nice Tommy, surely he's not got anything insidious planned for later on...

Ring Studio

I Fiori del Male

© Andrea Passon / www.andreapasson.it