LEAP

Before anything moved, one frame had to read as a comic panel. The style lives in a shared shader library: toon bands from Shader-to-RGB, screen-space Ben-Day dots that grow in the shadows, hatching, a hard rim light, Grease Pencil Line Art for the ink, and a chromatic print offset in the compositor.

The look kept changing all the way to the end. Look passes 2 to 4 in V1.3 halved the halftone, pulled saturation down about 9%, and gave the Glitch an acid-green ramp so the two characters separate from the violet city by value as well as by hue.

The first hero was made of rigid ellipsoids per bone. It read as a wooden mannequin, and Dror's note was simply that it looked cheap. So the hero became KITE, an original character: mustard bomber jacket (the only yellow in the film, so the eye always finds Kite), black suit with cyan lines, magenta wrist launchers, white lenses.

1. Concept A front A-pose sheet, drawn for image-to-3D.
2. Tripo v3.1 image-to-3D gave a clean model: 2M faces, decimated to 127k.
3. Rigged by hand Tripo's auto-rigger treated Kite as a generic creature, so the skeleton was fitted from mesh cross-sections and skinned with bone heat.
4. V1 look Bold ink outline, colour-shifted cel bands and a coloured rim. The dark hatching was dropped.

V0's villain was a cloud of 150 cubes nobody could read. The GLITCH became a rigged voxel kaiju: a smooth skinned mesh that Geometry Nodes turn into cubes every frame, so it deforms like a creature but always reads as pixels. It also shatters.

The city went from boxes with nothing moving to a kit with storefronts, fire escapes, an el-train, a spire at the end of the avenue and 473 driving cars. Shots were then staged on the real map: the perch, the billboard gag, the rift and the tower all have fixed coordinates.

Characters are animated on twos and cameras on ones, which is the Spider-Verse rhythm. Motion came from a mix of Kimodo text-to-motion clips, Mixamo clips and hand-built key poses for swings and impacts. Most of the work went into making it read: anticipation, smears, hit-stops, squash on contact, and how much of the frame the hero fills.

Cameras behave like operators: spring-damped follow and aim, ease in and settle out, rotational shake on impact. An early camera shake moved the camera position and teleported it up to 6 m on hits. A motion audit measured it, and it was replaced.

The whole film is timed to Kite's narration: 15 lines recorded with ElevenLabs, each transcribed back to check it. The score was generated as nine separate sections and cut on the timeline, because whole-track scores ignored the moods. Sound effects are real CC0 recordings placed on the film's own event frames (web thwips, footsteps, punches on contact frames), mixed to −14 LUFS and checked for photosensitive flashes at every cut.

Quality came from measuring, not from the agent saying it was good. Every cut went through three kinds of check:

Six days, from the first overnight version to i16. Pick a cut to watch it. The earlier cuts are 480p to keep the page light.