Creating the Titles for Marvel’s ‘Spider-Man 2’ Game Perception explains how they used Maxon One and After Effects to celebrate key moments in the PlayStation 5 game.

Marvel’s “Spider-Man 2” game sees Peter Parker and Miles Morales battle to save their friends, their city, and themselves from destructive symbiote forces and a legion of villains. Perception worked in collaboration with Sony Interactive Entertainment, Insomniac Games, and Marvel to create a visually distinctive and engaging end title sequence for the epic adventure game.

Founded in 2001 by Danny Gonzalez and Jeremy Lasky, Perception is an Emmy-nominated design and motion graphic studio with a talent for visual storytelling. From “Iron Man” and “Lightyear” to “Spider-Man,” they are known for creating impactful title designs for Hollywood blockbusters, TV shows, and now games.

Chief Creative Director Doug Appleton led a twelve-strong team for this project, and we asked him to catch us up on Perception’s work, unpack the rewards and challenges of title design, and share the insights and processes that defined the team’s creative approach.

Appleton: In the two years since we last spoke about our main on end titles for Disney and Pixar’s “Lightyear”, we’ve continued work with clients like Marvel and Disney on films and TV shows, including “The Marvels,” “Loki” Season 2, and now end titles for the “Spider-Man 2” game on PlayStation 5.

Appleton: Sony reached out to us after seeing our movie title work and asked us to pitch for a cinematic end title sequence that celebrates the player’s journey. I’m a huge Spider-Man fan, and a massive fan of the first two games, so it was incredible to even be asked to pitch on this sequence. I have been playing Insomniac’s games since the first “Spyro,” so getting to work with them was a dream come true.

Appleton: I love the initial creative challenges. What’s the concept? What’s the hook? I find that process really rewarding. This was our first game title project and having created end titles for “Spider-Man: Far From Home” and “Spider-Man: Homecoming,” this offered a new perspective on the franchise and title sequences. 

At over five minutes, the main difference was the sheer length and amount of work that went into these game credits. A film or TV show normally features about 30 names and unique cards over a sequence between two to two and a half minutes. But this sequence came with a list of 800 names and there was no way we could create unique cards for everyone. We had to focus on composing the shots to tell a story and accommodate that long list.

Appleton: Our normal pitch approach involves collaborating with clients to come up with the best possible idea, respecting that we are just visitors to a world that they have been working on for years.

We like to come in with a handful of concepts, giving the client an opportunity to build on those ideas. Often, it ends up being a little bit of A, a little of B, a little bit of C, and after another conversation we come up with a D, and that becomes the final concept. This pitch was no different, and after feedback we combined a few of the ideas to make what ended up being the final piece. 

Appleton: There was nothing we were told to absolutely include, but Insomniac sent us a ton of cinematics from the game with story beats they felt were important. We then had a long conversation with the narrative director in the story department that filled in details and context.

Narratively, we think it's incredibly important to build a title sequence that represents the thing it's a part of. In this case, the vignettes all came from those early conversations about what were integral and important moments in the story. The key themes of infestation, transformation, and liberation informed our ideas. Also, the people behind the masks and their relationships were important to the story, so we knew we had to include moments of these characters out of costume as well.

Appleton: Visually, we wanted the sequence to be distinct from the look of the game with a new style that drew people in. Using Photoshop and Illustrator, our Art Director Steve Savalle did early look development, leaving a ton of negative space in the frames for the credits.

The concept was not quite game cinematics, not quite illustrated, but some blend in between. We spent a lot of time sketching storyboards, bouncing that back to the client and refining it. We had a great relationship with their designers and directors and would spitball ideas on a call, going back and forth to develop ideas.

We were fortunate that Insomniac shared all the characters they had modeled and rigged in Maya. We posed the characters and brought them into Cinema 4D for texturing and camera work. After rendering lighting, diffuse, and reflection passes in Redshift, we moved everything into After Effects for final compositing.

Appleton: Because I personally like to get the bare minimum out of 3D and dial in the look in in comp, the integration between Cinema 4D and After Effects was huge. All the paint spots and even the lines coming off the hands were done in comp, so it was great to quickly get our 3D data from C4D to After Effects with nulls and then easily place details and objects that tracked with the camera in the After Effects scene.

Appleton: As the sequence evolved through the key themes, we used color, edits, and camera moves to create a sense of interest and narrative progression. Shots begin tight and close to a certain character or plot piece. As the camera moves and shifts throughout the shot, ranging from slow and sweeping to sharp and punchy, more information is revealed to show a larger picture and more defined narrative. 

Color played an important narrative role as well as creating visual interest, contrast, and variety as it shifted between black and white and color. The shifts of color were not about good or bad, but about showing a more nuanced story. Redshift light groups allowed us to really play with how much of the character was in shadow or light, essentially relighting them in comp as we figured out the right balance. 

Appleton: Because of the illustrated style we were working with, I think people were the most challenging to get right. It’s a lot easier to get monsters and skin-tight spandex suits right than close ups of people, for example getting Harry Osborne’s face to look like Harry from the game. 

It was also challenging to get hair that looks natural. For some shots we solved that by getting a base render out of Redshift, grabbing a still frame and using Photoshop to paint some nicer hair on it and then tracked that hair back into the scene.

Appleton: To manage the constantly updated credit list of 800 names, we brought in a technical director to write a script that could populate our After Effects project with names from an Excel document. We only needed to set that once and it dynamically updated iterations. That script is going to be huge for us because credit updates are an inevitable part of all title projects.