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Tag: Spider Man

  • Preston Mutanga’s Animation in Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

    Preston Mutanga’s Animation in Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

    The animated masterpiece Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse hit the screens on June 2, 2023. Ever since it’s what every Spiderman fan could talk about. Not just because of the exceptionally brilliant imagery, or the whopping $100 million that went into its production. An amazing discovery has led to thousands of people trooping to cinemas to watch this movie.

    An incredibly talented fourteen-year-old high school student, Preston Mutanga animated the movie’s trailer in a viral clip on Twitter. A shot-by-shot LEGO version of the Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse original trailer. This stunned the film’s writers and producers Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, leading them to personally approach him for a key scene in the movie.

    Mutanga, hailing from Toronto, showcased his creativity in early January when he shared the two-minute recreation of the ‘Across the Spider-Verse’ trailer. Using Blender software, he cleverly mimicked Lego bricks and boom, it went wild on Twitterverse. After the trailer was released last year, Mutanga has dedicated himself to perfecting the clip since December 2022. With his remarkable animation skills, it didn’t take long for luck to shine his way.

    In an interview with the New York Times, Miller said “We found out that it was a 14-year-old kid who made it. And we were like, This looks incredibly sophisticated for a non-adult, non-professional to have made. It blew us all away, including some of the best animators in the world.”

    Spider Man: Across The Spider-verse Animation Is Exceptional Even For A 14-year Old

    Preston Mutanga's Animation in Spider Man Across the Spider-Verse
    Preston Mutanga Leggo Animator for Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

    Recognizing his gift, Mutanga’s parents, who are physicists, and public health instructors, have always encouraged his artistic pursuits. His father introduced him to the 3D software that caught his interest and tilted their world positively. Ever since discovering Blender, Mutanga has been whetting his animation skills. Learning all he could from YouTube videos for several years. Although at first, they were hesitant when Miller and his team reached out, they eventually allowed his talents to flourish. His father even got him a new computer and the latest graphics card for advanced animation.

    Working diligently during his high school spring break and with regular guidance from Miller, Mutanga poured his efforts into animating the LEGO sequence for the movie. The experience proved enlightening for the young animator and he revealed it to the New York Times. “One new thing I learned was definitely the feedback aspect of it, like how much stuff actually gets changed from the beginning to the final product.”

    After several weeks of dedicated work, Mutanga’s animation contribution was complete. And his role in the film’s success was equally evident. ‘Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse’ has already generated over $208 million worldwide, following in the footsteps of its critically acclaimed predecessor. Mutanga’s incredible talent has also garnered him a significant following on social media. Where he showcases his Lego-style creations inspired by various franchises such as Minions, Moon Knight, and Better Call Saul.

    Reflecting on his experience, Mutanga expressed his gratitude for the opportunity to collaborate with the creators of the film that he adored. “I adored the first movie and was so hyped for the second one. So getting to work with the people who actually made this masterpiece was honestly like a dream,” he shared with The New York Times.

  • Amazing Spider-Man 2 Review: Swinging nowhere

    Amazing Spider-Man 2 Review: Swinging nowhere

    Every year or two they release a new Spider-Man game. Every year or two I get my hopes up that the developers have made a proper follow-up to 2004’s Spider-Man 2—the only fun Spider-Man game in recent memory. We’re now a decade out from that, and Amazing Spider-Man 2 shares (mostly) the same title as that lone bright spot. Is this the Spider-Man game that will break the long streak of stinkers?

    Nope.

    Impossible standards

    In a way, it’s unfair to developer Beenox to hold them to Spider-Man 2’s standards. See, Spider-Man 2 wasn’t even a very good game. It fell prey to a lot of the movie-game pitfalls—repetitive content, dumb missions, a horrible camera, et cetera.

    The swinging, though. Spider-Man 2 was the first game to implement a system where Spidey’s webs actually stuck to walls instead of fastening to some invisible helicopter in the sky. I distinctly remember standing in a GameStop in New Jersey, waiting for my dad to finish up shopping at Home Depot or something, transfixed by the way the swinging worked, probably humming the song from the Spider-Man 2 trailer under my breath. (I think it was Vicarious by Dashboard Confessional? Different times.)

    Spider-Man 2 was the first game to make me feel like Spidey, which was a big deal—he’d always been one of my favorite superheroes, and I’ve long thought that web-swinging is a more interesting mode of transportation than flight.

    It was easy to put up with all the dumb movie-game garbage in Spider-Man 2 because swinging around Manhattan was such a joy. Keep in mind, this was also an era when expansive open-world games were relatively novel. We’d only had two large-scale Grand Theft Auto games and a handful of knock-offs. There was still a sense of wonder at just moving around an enormous environment, even if you could only enter a handful of buildings and the draw distance was about a hundred feet.

    This is what nostalgia results in: impossible standards.

    Amazing Spider-Man 2 is not really that bad, compared to Spider-Man 2. Let me rephrase: “Game released this month” is not really that bad, compared to “Game that came out a decade ago.”

    After a baffling sidestep into the old “webs attach to skyhooks” mode in 2012’s Amazing Spider-Man, Beenox has brought Spidey back into a world governed by physics. His webs are forced to attach to walls or ceilings, which is a step in the right direction. You also affect speed by releasing higher or lower in the arc of your swing.

    Swinging still doesn’t feel quite right, though. I could never quite get the hang of Spidey’s momentum, and it seemed like I swung into walls a bit more often than I’d expect. It also lacks the complexity of Spider-Man 2’s system, which allowed for all sorts of high-level maneuvering by accounting for how long you held buttons. Amazing Spider-Man 2 is at least on par with Ultimate Spider-Man (the second-best Spidey game) though, as far as swinging is concerned.

    Roll film

    Where Amazing Spider-Man 2 is not on par with anything worth playing recently is in the actual game part. This is where those “impossible standards” come into play. I’m not going to argue that Amazing Spider-Man 2 is any worse than the original Spider-Man 2. But that’s not a high bar.

    Amazing Spider-Man 2 has far too much in common with the movie tie-in games of old. Bad camera, bad lip-syncing, bad models, bad mission design—it’s all present here.

    Side quests are universally abysmal. Many of them are the same rote, quicktime event-infested tedium we’ve seen in other Spider-Man games—stop the fleeing car full of criminals!—except here you have to load into them. You swing to a location, hit a prompt to start the mission, and then sit and wait for the scene to load instead of having the events trigger organically in the world. You already won’t want to do the missions because they’re boring, but you doubly won’t want to do them when you have to sit through a loading screen each time.

    Too bad. You have to do them. If you don’t, Spidey’s reputation goes down and you’re targeted by hit squads that make it an enormous pain to just swing around the city. Apparently “not stopping a crime” is equivalent to “endorsing crime.” It’s asinine, and makes the game tedious even if you’re just there to run through story content.

    And the story? For some baffling reason Marvel or Beenox or Activision or whoeverdecided the story shouldn’t really match the story of the film. Maybe they got gun-shy after Amazing Spider-Man spoiled the film for certain players?

    Whatever the case, you’re left with an utterly forgettable tale that mostly concerns a bunch of iconic villains doing the least iconic things possible. Some of my favorite villains make an appearance in this game, but they’re given short shrift by lackluster writing and acting.

    Another thing: Apparently this game, despite being an official tie-in, couldn’t secure rights to any of the actors. Neither likenesses nor voices are present here. This results in an awkward situation where, for instance, Spidey sounds a lot like Tobey Maguire instead of Andrew Garfield, and Gwen Stacey doesn’t even appear in the entire game. It’s explained away with so much hand-waving.

    No, it doesn’t really make sense.

    Bottom line

    Sorry, true believers. I know you’re holding out hope for a great Spider-Man game, but this isn’t it. It’s good for a few hours of web-swinging entertainment if you need a fix, but by no means does it recapture the magic. (That won’t stop me from getting my hopes up the next time a Spider-Man game comes around, though.)

    This review was originally posted on PCWorld. Price When Rated: $40$40 Our Rating: 3.0   Operating System: Windows, Mac