Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018) is an animated film by Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, and Rodney Rothman that stars Miles Morales, a teenager who is suddenly pushed into the responsibility of being the next Spider-Man following the untimely death of the previous mantle holder, Peter Parker. The film was released to universal acclaim with many critics and fans alike praising its writing, characters, voice acting, soundtrack and most of all, visuals and how it manages to set itself apart from other animated films.
While some adaptions tend to shy away from the silliness of their comic book origins in favour of a more grounded/realistic approach, Spider-Verse fully embraces it with the inclusion of comic book elements such as captions and ‘sound effects’.
The movie successfully manages to imitate its comic book inspirations to the point of each frame feeling like it was ripped right out of the pages of a graphic novel. The movie does this with the use of effects such as Ben-Day and Kirby Dots (named after their creators Benjamin Day and Jack Kirby), and not having any motion blur or depth of field.
Ben-Day dots are described as “dots or a variety of patterns used widely in blockmaking and lithography to add texture, shading and detail to artwork and designs” (Ward 2008). Examples of this in both comic books and the movie can be seen below.
As can be seen by the images above, Ben-Day Dots were used to simulate lighting in place of actual shading. Tint lines were also used to create shadows or give off a darker lighting effect, which can be seen in the background of the comic panel and on the darker parts of Spider-Mans mask in the screenshot of the movie.
Kirby Dots (or Kirby Krackle) are masses of dots used to represent negative space around energy, but not necessarily the energy itself . It’s also sometimes used to illustrate explosions and other particle effects.
Earlier I mentioned that the movie does not contain any motion blur or depth of field, and this is true. Again, the movie takes many of it’s visual inspirations from comic books. In place of motion blur they use motion lines (along with a few other tricks), which in comics old and new are used to represent movement.
The film is animated at 12 frames a second rather than the regular 24 in order to remove motion blur. Its frame rate might appear jarring at first, but it doesn’t take long for audiences to get used to it and see how the filmmakers took advantage of this style of animation.
Below are some frame by frame examples of the motion lines in action and other visual tricks used in order to simulate fast paced movement.
Another way the movie simulates motion is to make the backgrounds entirely 2D.
In the backgrounds of the screenshots above, Spider-Man is animated in front 2D images that were drawn to make it look like he is rushing through the environment.
As for how depth of field is handled, it is replaced with an effect that give things out of focus a feel similar to that of an old comic.
As can be seen in the Spider-Verse screenshot above, the background along with Miles are ‘out of focus’ and have a sort of printing error look to them like the old comic panel example above, where the colours go past the outlines.
References:
- Ward, G. W. R 2008, The Grove Encyclopedia of Materials and Techniques in Art, Oxford University Press, New York, USA.
The Art of Moving Images 