Fan-Made Video Putting Tom Holland Into The Spider-Verse Has Everybody Saying The Same Thing
Have you ever wondered what it would look like if every live-action Spider-Man was thrown into the Spider-Verse? Well, you don't have to just wonder anymore. With some help from artificial intelligence, a small creative team at Corridor Crew did just that. The fan-made video took Tom Holland's Spider-Man, along with dozens of other renditions of Spidey, and threw it right into the middle of the highly stylized Spider-Verse, and it just about looks like it was done by Sony Pictures Imageworks.
"Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse" took four years and required about 800 people to complete, according to filmmaker Chris Miller in an interview with the Los Angeles Times. Corridor Crew created a new workflow to take live footage and animate it into a style that looks almost identical to what you see in "Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse." The new process uses machine learning and artificial intelligence to create images and video in the style of the Spider-Verse, but there is still a lot more that needs to be done to that footage before it can be turned into the final product we see.
Corridor Crew editor Dean Hughes spearheaded the project with help from a few of the other guys on the team, and through some pretty cool tools and a lot of hard work, they were able to make something stunning.
Bringing Holland into the Spider-Verse required new innovation and hard work
Corridor Crew's Dean Hughes came up with a way to take live video, run it through a couple of programs, and have it spit out some pretty fantastic animation that looks a lot like the style in Spider-Verse. But using these tools to procedurally generate an animation style that looks a lot like someone else's work had Hughes grappling with some ethical questions. He made it a point to ask a very interesting question during the production process of the film, "Are we just stealing from these artists that we super respect?"
If the end goal was to make a process that turned anything into the Spider-Verse with a single click of the mouse, you might consider that stealing. But what Hughes and the guys at Corridor Crew ended up doing was more of a love letter to all of the hard work that was put into the original movie. And to make this point even more pronounced, Hughes recruited another guy at Corridor Crew, Fenner Rockliffe, to help really fine-tune this video.
The two set out to break down "Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse" and figure out all of the little animation techniques the studio used to really make the stylized final product. And their result really does look like something straight out of the Spider-Verse.
Even YouTube commenter David Perron, who claims to be working on the sequel to the film said, "I work in compositing at Sony Imageworks on Spider-Verse 2 and I can say that you guys are definitely onto something! Can't wait for you guys to see the movie when we're done with overtime hahaha!"
Corridor Crew's achievement is nothing short of amazing
After watching the video, it may seem hard to believe that just a few people in a relatively short amount of time created something so polished and believable. The first thing that comes to mind when you finally see Tom Holland almost perfectly animated in the style of the Spider-Verse is the same sentiment that most of the viewers shared in the YouTube comments section — "Amazing." From start to finish, nearly every part of the short video was called amazing.
Nibhan Raheem called it an "amazing process" in their comment, and another user, Alexandre C said "That is awesome," and then applauded the ethics discussion brought up in the video. Scrolling through the rest of the comments, it's plain to see that this new technology and process was blowing people's minds. In addition to all of the hand-crafted effects and hard work that was put into the video, what AI and machine learning are able to do for the workflow is truly astounding. YouTuber Existential Selkath was quick to point out how "genuinely incredible that AI is already at this level" in a comment. The praise over the use of AI and the artist's willingness to embrace it is echoed throughout the comment section.
And as an added bonus, Tom Holland isn't the only Spider-Man that gets thrown into the Spider-Verse. The team at Corridor Crew wanted to throw in the most obscure versions of Spider-Man they could find, and they definitely did not disappoint in that aspect. You'll have to watch the entire video to see the true scale of this trip into the Spider-Verse. Oh, and don't forget about all of the Avengers and Thanos; they make appearances, too.
The sequel to "Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse" will come out in two parts, with the first half, "Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse," arriving in theaters on June 2, 2023, according to Vulture. The second part of the sequel, "Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse" will premiere in 2024.