Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse might be the best Spider-Man movie to date, with its fantastic story, unforgettable moments (Miles “rising” in that upside-down shot! Aunt May sitting in Peter’s lab!), and its eye-popping animation style. The sequel, Across the Spider-Verse, is on its way, but in the meantime, YouTube VFX studio Corridor has created a Spider-Verse fan video … featuring Tom Holland’s Spidey.
The video begins with the scene from Spider-Man: No Way Home in which Doctor Strange messes up the spell to make everyone forget Peter is Spider-Man. Instead of pulling a bunch of Spideys into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, though, Strange accidentally sends Peter into the Spider-Verse, where he meets Miles Morales.
The chaos doesn’t stop there, though. More Spider-Men join them, including Andrew Garfield and Tobey Maguire’s Peter Parkers. The video ends with a massive recreation of the famous pointing Spider-Men meme, with hundreds of Peters trying to figure out what’s going on.
The animation style attempts to replicate the style of Spider-Verse—and it almost gets there. In a followup video, Corridor explains how they did it.
As the video explains, the creators use the AI image generator Stable Diffusion to essentially rotoscope footage of Tom Holland using Spider-Verse‘s art style. Dean, one of the animators, explains that the video is an experiment in “replicat[ing] the style of the film in a procedural manner. We’ve been experimenting with a lot of AI tools, in particular AI image generation …. This method will allow us to tell a story in the Spider-Verse by letting us take a real piece of footage and taking it into the Spider-Verse.”
The creators wonder if it’s possible to bring their animation method to the MCU. “Wait, wait, wait,” says Niko, another Corridor member. “Spider-Verse took four years to make, and thousands and thousands of artists [Note: Spider-Verse employed about 140 animators, and a total crew of about 800.] … you have the arrogance to think that you can just—one man, with one computer—make any shot a Spider-Verse shot?”
“Well, I might need one other man with one other computer,” Dean jokes.
Hmmm. There’s a reason why films are created by casts and crews of hundreds, instead of a couple of guys at their computers. As AI artist Supercomposite explained in our interview with her, the machine doesn’t do all the work in AI art. A good AI artists will spend a significant amount of time working with their tools and adjusting the resulting images, often by hand. If good animation were as simple as rotoscoping real actors, then all the other animation styles that have flourished over the years would never have developed.
But in the meantime, Corridor’s fan video is a cool experiment, and it lets us fantasize about all our favorite Spideys meeting up. Meanwhile, Across the Spider-Verse is slated for release on June 2, 2023.
(featured image: Sony)
