How the film broke ground by making comics come alive
on the big screen
Along came a
Spider-Verse
By Alyssa mercante
Design by CEROS ORIGINALS
ALONG CAME A
Spider-Verse
Sony Pictures Animation
It’s already won over thirty awards, (including a Golden Globe, a BAFTA, and a Critic’s Choice Award) and it’s up for an Oscar this weekend. When creating Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, the creators at Sony Pictures Imageworks abandoned traditional animation and illustration techniques, blending old-school comics and animation with cutting-edge tech—they even had to write new software to achieve their vision. The film swirls with unique colors, explodes with Ben-Day dots, and emotes with speech bubbles, all of which make it feel like a comic book in motion. “They were reinventing a wheel that wasn’t completely round anyway,” Geoff Boucher, Deadline’s genre editor, tells us.
Click through to see the comic book influences that make the film so unique.
dots
LINES
Words
Panels
dots
LINES
Words
Panels
Sony Pictures Animation
Click to see the design elements
LINES
DOTS
PANELS
WORDS
“When we looked at what made comic books so interesting, it was how the illustrators used lines on faces for the extra emotion,”
- Visual FX supervisor Danny Dimian told Popular Mechanics
WORDS
PANELS
DOTS
LINES
“The film actually has no motion blur in it, but, instead, borrows from certain anime techniques to replicate the feeling of motion with
a frame.”
- Patrick O’Keefe to Polygon
Panels act as scenes within the pages of a comic book, depicting changes in location or a character’s movement.
Several scenes in Spider-Verse are broken up visually by bold black lines replicating comic book panels.
Named after illustrator Benjamin Henry Day Jr., popularized in post-War comics, they’re used to show shading and color variation when working with a severely limited palette—as old comics could only be printed in four colors.
“Then we were
bringing in the halftones, because that’s old school comic book DNA, as well, where you would have these halftone patterns that you’d rub on
that would become
your grades.”
- Patrick O’Keefe, art director, to Polygon.
After Miles Morales is bitten by a radioactive spider and starts experiencing physical changes, his internal thoughts appear on-screen as narration blocks—the way internal monologues are shown in comics.
There are multiple instances of sounds depicted as word balloons during intense action scenes.
Sony Pictures Animation/Illustration: Peter Carlson
Click to see the
design elements