“Hi. This is Bob Persichetti.” “This is Peter Ramsey.” “And this is Rodney Rothman, and we are the directors of “Spider-Man — Into the Spider-Verse.’” “Alright, so this is our obligatory spider biting kid scene, but this one’s special because we’ve got Miles. You know, his uncle Aaron brought him down to this place that he’s never been before, a place that has some history between Aaron and Miles” father Jefferson. And he’s looking to just blow off some pressure from school.” “Now, you on your own, Miles.” NARRATOR: “The sequence is fun. I mean, we really tried to stretch and use the textures of hip-hop, use the textures of graffiti, street art, even the cutting patterns that you’d see in, like, a music video. We’re doing an effect right here where his paint is splattering the camera in dots. We’re not just evoking kind of, like, “80s and “90s visual aesthetics. We’re also setting up this idea of Kirby dots. Jack Kirby is a comic book artist and is famous for these very abstract expressive dots. Those become important later in our movie, so we’re setting that up here also.” “A little help?” NARRATOR: “You can also see a lot of the use of different printing techniques that are transposed to cinematography techniques with our halftone dots, which are drawn from comics, the use of chromatic aberration you can see here, where the figures in the foreground are kind of blurred, and the colors and the edges drift over each other. That’s drawn from the imperfect comic book printing techniques that give the illusion of blur. In our movie, we don’t have any computer blur effects. It’s all drawn from graphic techniques to create the illusion of space and distance.” “Yeah. The story reason for doing that is we’re trying to say that Miles” universe is different than any other. So we’re trying to tweak the rules of cinema and lighting a little bit in very specific ways to make his world distinct.” “This was one of the early scenes that we did between Aaron and Miles, and it really became a touchstone for the style of animation we were doing as well. And then here, this is sort of the first introduction of really leaning into the 2D artwork and the comic book graphic with the spider bite. And then, of course, it’s just fun to have him be blase about the spider biting him. It’s a horrifying looking spider.” [laughter]