In Mitchells, we did a lot of line work, but again, it wasn’t overly relied upon. The backgrounds were not heavy on line work. “On the first Spider-Verse,” explains Lasker, “we had created inklines on characters through animation and through FX. The linework, too, had to update as a character moved and be in sync with any changing animation frame rates. Inklines and outlining were things Imageworks dealt with in impressive creative ways on Into the Spider-Verse, but needed to find ways to go even further on this new film, while also retaining a ‘hand-drawn’, sometimes even messy, look and feel.
And then with characters like Punk, we pushed even more onto 4s and 6s, making it really choppy and splitting limbs off so they could animate at different rates, and change costumes at different rates.” Kismet for linework
But on the FX end is where it got a little tricky. “Generally,” says Lasker, “cloth and hair is typically going to follow what animation has done because it all has to sync up, and we’ve gotten pretty good at that.