Sony wanted to make a new Spider Man movie. They asked two smart men for help. Their names were Phil and Chris.
Phil and Chris liked Spider Man. But they were tired of the same old story. They wanted to do something completely new.
They said they would make the movie. But it had to be a cartoon. It also had to be about Miles Morales.
Miles was a different kind of Spider Man. He was a young boy from Brooklyn. He had a mom and a dad.
The movie studio bosses were nervous. People usually only liked Peter Parker. But the bosses finally said yes.
Phil and Chris started building a team. They needed the best artists in the world. They hired hundreds of people.
The directors wanted a very special style. They wanted the movie to look like a comic book. A real comic book you can hold.
Most computer cartoons look very smooth. They look like shiny plastic toys. The team hated that shiny look.
They told the artists to break the rules. They wanted the pictures to look crunchy. They wanted to see the messy lines.
Comic books are printed with tiny colored dots. These dots blend together to make pictures. The team wanted those dots in the movie.
Computers did not know how to draw these dots. Computers only knew how to make things smooth. The artists had to teach the machines.
The artists typed new computer code. They made the computers draw tiny dots for shadows. This was very hard to do.
Next, they looked at how things move. Most movies show twenty four pictures every second. This makes moving things look very smooth.
The team decided to show only twelve pictures a second. They called this animating on twos. It made the movement look choppy.
This choppy movement felt like flipping pages in a book. It made the characters look like drawings. It was a brilliant idea.
But there was a big problem. The choppy movement made fast action look blurry. Your eyes could not follow the fights.
The artists had to invent a trick. They drew long smears of color. They put these smears between the choppy pictures.
This helped your brain connect the jumps. The action looked fast but still felt crunchy. It was a perfect balance.
They also added words on the screen. When someone got hit, the word POW appeared. This made it feel just like a comic.
The artists used a trick called line work. They drew black lines on top of the 3D shapes. They drew these lines by hand.
They drew lines on faces to show feelings. They drew lines on buildings to show cracks. This took a huge amount of time.
A normal cartoon takes a few days for one scene. This movie took weeks for just one second. The artists were working very slowly.
The movie studio got very worried. They thought the movie would never be finished. They thought the art style was too weird.
The team had to prove they were right. They worked on a special test scene. They put all their new tricks into it.
They showed this test to the bosses. The bosses were completely amazed. They had never seen anything like it before.
The bosses gave the team more money. They hired even more artists to help. The team grew to over eight hundred people.
Now they had to record the voices. They found a young actor named Shameik. He had the perfect voice for Miles.
Shameik sounded like a real kid. He sounded a little scared but also brave. He brought Miles to life.
They also needed voices for other Spider people. They got funny actors and serious actors. Every character sounded unique and special.
The animators listened to the voices. They matched the mouth movements to the words. They made the cartoon bodies act like real people.
The story was still very hard to write. Phil and Chris kept changing the script. They wanted the story to be perfect.
Sometimes they threw away whole scenes. This made the artists very tired. They had to draw things all over again.
But the directors knew what they were doing. They wanted the movie to have a big heart. They wanted people to cry and cheer.
The movie has a very famous scene. Miles finally believes in himself. He jumps off a very tall building.
The camera flips upside down. It looks like Miles is falling up into the sky. It is a beautiful moment.
The team worked on this one jump for months. They wanted the music and the art to match. They wanted it to feel like magic.
As they finished, they found a new problem. The computer files were too big. The computers kept crashing and stopping.
The tiny dots and hand drawn lines took up too much memory. The computer brains were getting too full.
Smart computer engineers had to help. They built bigger digital brains for the studio. They saved the movie from breaking.
Time was running out fast. The movie was supposed to come out in December. It was already autumn.
The artists slept at their desks. They drank a lot of coffee. They painted dots and lines all night long.
Finally, the very last picture was done. The team was exhausted but very proud. They had finished the impossible movie.
The movie went to theaters all over the world. Families bought tickets and sat in the dark. The movie started to play.
People could not believe their eyes. The movie did not look like a normal cartoon. It looked like magic.
The story of Miles made people very happy. Kids saw a hero who looked just like them. They felt very special.
Movie reviewers wrote beautiful things. They said it was the best Spider Man movie ever. They said it changed cartoons forever.
The movie made hundreds of millions of dollars. The bosses at Sony were very happy. They wanted to make more movies like this.
Other movie makers saw what happened. They realized they did not have to make smooth cartoons. They could be messy too.
Soon, other new cartoons started looking different. They used dots and lines and choppy motion. Spider Verse started a huge trend.
Then came the biggest night of all. The team went to a fancy awards show. It was called the Oscars.
They waited nervously in their seats. A famous person opened a golden envelope. They read the winner’s name out loud.
Spider Verse won the gold statue. It was named the best animated movie of the year. The team cheered and hugged.
Phil and Chris went up on stage. They held the heavy gold statue. They thanked all the tired artists.
They proved that taking a big risk is good. They proved that weird ideas can be the best ideas.
This movie is about finding your own power. It shows that mistakes make art beautiful. Anyone can wear the hero mask.