The animated Spider-Man film isn’t solely created by a massive team of professional artists and experienced creators, as one might expect. It also provided an opportunity to a young, talented artist in the industry.
14-year-old animator Preston Mutanga actually crafted the Lego segment in the movie showing a Lego version of Peter Parker’s Spider-Man in a Lego version of New York City.
In January, Mutanga uploaded a Lego recreation of the “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” trailer, which got viral on the internet and caught the attention of the movie’s writers and producers Phil Lord and Cristopher Miller.
“We found out that it was a 14-year-old kid who made it and we were like, ‘This looks incredibly sophisticated for a nonadult, nonprofessional to have made. It blew us all away, including some of the best animators in the world,” Miller told The New York Times.
Interested in Mutanga’s work, Sony Pictures Animation, the movie’s production company, contacted the young animator offering a job to animate the Lego scene in the movie.
“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,” Mutanga said.
Though Mutanga is ecstatic about the email, his parents were skeptical at first until they confirmed that the offer was legitimate. As such, his parents supported him in his craft and built him a new computer with a state-of-the-art graphics card that can handle the project he’ll be working on.
“I know Preston has a gift that was given to him by God, and once we identified that he had that gift, all we could do as parents was to nurture it and let him fly,” Mutanga’s mother told the international news site.
Mutanga shared that he’s been animating since he was younger after his father showed him the 3D software Blender and got hooked on it. He said that he has been watching YouTube videos to teach himself the technicality of the craft and gradually learned from the platform.
The young animator’s YouTube Channel (@legome_theog) where he posts animated CGI Lego content has now 312k subscribers with over 22 million total views.
“Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” was released last month grossing a box office of $663.5 million, overtaking “The Smurfs” record set in 2011 to become Sony Pictures Animation’s highest-grossing movie of all time.
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