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"This production has been death by a thousand paper cuts."
Creating a movie is hard, especially if it's Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse – a successful specimen of the franchise. But when does "hard" become "impossible"?
The artists working on the film say its production was "death by a thousand paper cuts." While the visuals are great, they took tons of overhauls in the late stages of creation and caused about 100 artists to quit.
According to Vulture's article, one of the directors, Phil Lord, prefers editing fully rendered work instead of doing so early, meaning a lot of effort goes to waste. That's probably why Across the Spider-Verse was delayed for more than a year.
Additionally, Vulture's sources say animators had to twiddle their thumbs "from three to six months" in 2021 while waiting for Lord to "tinker with the movie in the layout stage." This meant they had to then work for over 11 hours, seven days a week, to catch up.
"And I do genuinely think it’s a good movie. But that being said, it’s been debilitating for a lot of the artists involved. Morale was incredibly low, and a lot of people reassessed if this was even something they wanted to be a part of. ... The frustrating thing is at the end of the day the work is good," said one of the artists.
Michelle Grady, the executive vice-president and general manager of Sony Pictures Imageworks, denies Lord is not to blame for delays and claims the reports do not represent the whole team, and most of the workers found the production process "extraordinarily rewarding".
At the same time, Amy Pascal, another producer on Across the Spider-Verse, has a different view of the situation. "One of the things about animation that makes it such a wonderful thing to work on is that you get to keep going until the story is right," she mentioned. "If the story isn’t right, you have to keep going until it is."
To those who felt demoralized by the difficult process, she says, "I guess, Welcome to making a movie."
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