The Mummy (dir. Alex Kurtzman) is a feature film reboot of the popular franchise that began in 1999. This version stars Tom Cruise, Russell Crowe and Sofia Boutella. You know that cool actress from Kingsman: The Secret Service with the blades on her feet? Her!

While the movie has been met with success financially and failure critically, the polarity of the reception should not diminish the AWESOME ANIMATED SPIDERS. And that’s because we animated them at Double Negative!

My first foray into feature animation had me working with around three other animators at the Vancouver studio. It was a relatively small show with Sebastian Weber at the helm as Lead Animator. Leo Bonisolli, a Senior, created a fantastic series of walk cycles for the spiders that were used for both crowd fx and by the animators for hero spiders.

From there, my spider shot involved applying the cycles to five spiders and then layering it up with custom animation. That’s 40 legs to animate!

In total I animated 16 shots. Only one shot was of spiders. The rest consisted of sexy prop animation, like ropes and street signs (psst, it’s not that sexy).

Nonetheless it was a fun project and I learnt a lot about animating spiders!