created the Lego scene in the new Spider-Verse film

Fourteen-year-old Preston Mutanga from Milton, Ont., recreated the characters he saw in the trailer of Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse to look Lego-style characters.

After hisis YouTube posting if his work was noticed by filmmaking team Christopher Miller and Phil Lord, he was offered to animate a scene in new Spider-Man film.

“I’m really, really inspired by how you can pretty much just do anything in animation,” Mutanga said. “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.

Mutanga was a fan of that first Spider-Verse movie, which he called “an artistic explosion.”

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.

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.

“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.”

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.”