A 14-Year-Old Helped Animate ‘Across the Spider-Verse’

Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse was brought to the big screen by an incredibly diverse team of artists and animators — maybe even more diverse than you would think.

One of the most interesting members on the team was Preston Mutanga, a 14-year-old boy. The high schooler had actually put together a shot-for-shot remake of the trailer, which the film’s producers caught wind of on Twitter. Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, some of the producers of Spider-Verse, were also the directors of the The LEGO Movie and The LEGO Movie 2. It was at this point they realized they wanted to do a scene in a LEGO universe.

“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,’ Miller told The New York Times. “It blew us all away, including some of the best animators in the world.”

They reached out to Mutanga, whose father had shown him a 3D software that helped him make his own amateur animated LEGO videos. Mutanga then worked on Across the Spider-Verse’s LEGO sequence, supposedly animating it “after finishing his homework on school nights.”

READ MORE: The Coolest Easter Eggs You Missed in Across the Spider-Verse

Mutanga said that what he learned working on the film was “the feedback aspect of [moviemaking], like how much stuff actually gets changed from the beginning to the final product.”

Mutanga says he wants to become an animator and director when he grows up. You’ve got to think he’s off to a great start. Here is the Across the Spider-Verse LEGO trailer he made that got this whole ball rolling in the first place.