Visual effects supervisor Mike Lasker has a long history with producers Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, having worked on “Cloudy with a Chance for Meatball” and its sequel, “Mitchells vs. the Machines” and “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-verse.” But when it came time for Lasker to get to work on that Oscar-winning film’s sequel, “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse,” he knew it was going to be a big challenge. Not that he wasn’t ready for it.
“What’s really great is a lot of our artists in our studio are used to doing this now [after multiple films]. So we like the challenge, we liked the hurdles,” Lasker tells Gold Derby in an exclusive video interview as part of our Meet the Experts: Visual Effects pane. “And that was what was so much fun about doing these three movies in a row [‘Into the Spider-Verse,’ ‘Mitchells vs. the Machines,’ and ‘Across the Spider-Verse’]. It has created this culture of just tearing down walls, and figuring out how to come up with solutions to things that seem impossible. So if anything working with Phil and Chris has sort of gotten us into this mode of creating images that no one’s ever seen before, and creating tools that no one’s ever used before.”
Everything in “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” feels bigger than its original, notably because the film goes to many different universes within the Spider-verse – focusing not just on the homeworld of Miles Morales, but Miguel O’Hara (Spider-Man 2099) and Gwen Stacy (Spider-Woman).
“Gwen’s world was the biggest challenge,” Lasker reveals. “It was the first new world we had to develop and it was the first 25 minutes of the movie. Plus you go back to it later. So we had to create tools and techniques that you can live in this world for that long. And what made it tough was it had to look like a painting – you had to have paint brushes coming off the edges, we had to have line work, we built a new line tool, we built tools where we could fill up to see the millions of brushstrokes. The look of the world was wet-on-wet medium, overly watercolor. But depending on the sequence, there were more graphic elements.”
“Across the Spider-Verse” also introduces countless versions of Spider-Man – particularly during a wild chase sequence that kicks off the film’s cliffhanger finale. (A sequel to “Across the Spider-Verse” is set to finish the story.) Lasker says he can’t pick a favorite Spider-person from the scene, but he does have a couple that remain close to his heart.
“You gotta love the T-rex Spidey. You gotta love Spider-cat,” he says. “There’s so many to choose from but Spider-cat is pretty great. A crowd favorite.”
“Spider-Man: Across the Spider-verse” from Sony is streaming now.
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