Preston Mutanga never expected to go viral, let alone have a hand in creating one of this year’s most successful movies.
The 14-year-old in Milton, Ont., was tapped to animate a scene in Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse after his shot-by-shot recreation of the original trailer — stylized so that the characters look like Legos — racked up hundreds of thousands of views online.
Mutanga posted his work on YouTube and Twitter, where it quickly drew the attention of filmmaking team Christopher Miller and Phil Lord. The animation duo produced Across The Spider-Verse and directed 2014’s The Lego Movie.
“I’m really, really inspired by how you can pretty much just do anything in animation,” Mutanga said in an interview with CBC News. “Your imagination is the limit.”
After his father, a physicist, introduced him to a 3D computer graphics software called Blender, Mutanga did some research and discovered that it could be used for film production and animation. He wanted to test it out himself.
“I got the idea to make it in Lego because Lego’s popular, Spider-Man’s popular, and I love both of them. So why not combine the two?”
WATCH | The redesigned movie trailer that caught Miller and Lord’s attention:
Across The Spider-Verse is a sequel to 2018’s Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse, which was lauded for seamlessly blending a range of animation styles and injecting new lifeblood into the Spider-Man franchise by introducing a new protagonist, Miles Morales.
Mutanga himself was a fan of that first Spider-Verse movie, which he called “an artistic explosion.” It’s set in a multiverse, where multiple versions of the superhero (including Spider-Pig, Spider-Punk and, yes, Lego Spider-Man) can exist at a time.
The scene Sony paid him to design for the sequel, also in the Lego animation style, is a colourful moment partly inspired by the original 2002 Spider-Man movie starring Tobey Maguire.
It’s set at The Daily Bugle, the New York City newspaper where Peter Parker freelances as a photojournalist. Spider-Man actor J.K. Simmons even makes a voice cameo during the scene, reprising his role as Bugle editor-in-chief J. Jonah Jameson from the original franchise.
“The first Spider-Verse was one of my favourite movies ever,” Mutanga said. “So getting to actually work on it was just a dream come true.”
‘There’s so much work that goes into movies’
During an initial Zoom call, Miller and Lord showed Mutanga storyboards that outlined their vision of what the scene should look like. He used those materials to design the sequence, meeting every few weeks with the filmmakers to get their feedback.
The timeline was tight. Mutanga’s trailer went viral in January, the movie was released in June, and for three months in between, the high schooler rolled up his sleeves, typically working on the scene during his free time after school.
After designing many different iterations, the final scene looked completely different from what he’d imagined.
“There’s a lot of planning involved with filmmaking,” he said. “There’s so much work that goes into movies that average, everyday viewers don’t really realize.”
Mutanga finally got to see his creation in a movie theatre at the Los Angeles red carpet premiere of Across The Spider-Verse in May, which he attended with his family, including his parents Theodore and Gisele.
“It was honestly a surreal experience. It felt like a fever dream,” the teen said. “Meeting the people that I looked up to for so long in my life was just a dream come true … let alone seeing my work on the big screen.
“That’s what really just lit me up, made me super happy.”
The next instalment in the Spider-Verse franchise is slated for a March 2024 release. Mutanga doesn’t yet know if he’ll work with Miller and Lord again — “it would be really cool” if he did — but he dreams of working as a director and animator in film and television.
“I wanna tell my own stories and spread them to the world.”
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