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chuwenjie · 1 year

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Spider-Man: Across the Spiderverse comes out later today so I wanted to write a post reflecting on my journey and experience working on this movie. So many people have supported me through this and I am so thankful to each and every one of you!

Text version of this post under the cut:

Spiderman: Across the Spiderverse comes out tonight. It feels really weird to be typing that out right now. I worked on the movie as a visdev artist for the last 2.5 years, from 2020 to 2023. Long post incoming.

There are a lot of reasons why I'd consider this film to be one of the most ambitious animated films to ever be made. As artists, we were asked to push ourselves far beyond our comfort zones and do things that had never been done before in animation.

Every time we reached a point where most people would say "this must possibly be as creative and weird as it gets," our entire team of artists and animators would smash right through the ceiling. The driving direction for the visuals of the film was to push the limits of every single frame; to challenge audience expectations and make something truly original.

The best thing about this film was that there wasn't a single boring day working on this movie. The hardest thing about this film was also that there wasn't a single boring day working on this movie.

There were times while working on this where the imposter syndrome hit me hard. This was my first big movie, and what a hell of a first movie to get thrust into.

I came in only a few years out of school with absolutely no idea what the hell I was doing. I constantly feared that someone had made a mistake in bringing me onto this film, and I was going to let everyone down. There was a solid chunk of those 2.5 years where I wasn't sure if animation was the right path for me.

If there's anything I could tell my past self it would be this: there are so many people who love you and believe in you. There will be a time when you get to stand on the other side of it, look back on everything and see how far you came.

I'm still working on self-acceptance every day (it will be a lifelong struggle, I'm sure), but I'm glad I didn't give up on myself. I'm proud of myself and my contributions to this film, and I'm certain that this movie will continue to change and shape the animation landscape just as the first one did. That's truly a special feeling to have been a part of. I am so incredibly grateful to every single person who helped me along this journey.

Here come the thanks:

To the ENTIRE visdev & art crew- it's been an honor getting to work alongside each and every one of you. My jaw is literally still on the floor from seeing your incredible talent day after day.

I want to thank Tiffany and Felicia especially for being there for me through tough times- I admire and respect you both so much as artists, and even better than that, my life is greatly enriched for being able to call you my friends.

Thank you Patrick and Dean for taking chances on me, teaching me so much about art and what I'm capable of, and encouraging me along the way. To Aymeric, your art is one of the reasons I initially became interested in animation and you have been one of the kindest & most empathetic mentors I could ever have asked for.

I want to thank my wonderful parents for believing in me always and raising me into the person I am today: everything I do in life is to make you proud. To my brother Andrew who is perpetually awake at 3 AM when I need someone to talk to- thank you for always picking up the phone and making me laugh.

And finally to my partner Luke for making me grilled cheeses on all of the difficult days, for never getting sick of me even when all I would ever talk about was work, and for patiently and steadfastly loving me throughout this entire thing. I don't think I could've done it without you.

Starting tomorrow I will begin posting and sharing some of the art I made for this movie; I'm looking forward to sharing some of my personal favorites with you. I hope each and every one of you enjoys Spiderman: Across the Spiderverse when it hits theaters later today!

#visual development #visdev #spiderman: across the spiderverse #spiderman atsv #gwen stacy

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pechebeche · 3 years

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Sorry, I should be clearer. You don't have to post this. I did see the 'callout' but I didn't know them. I thought the Ace Discourse takes were non-issues but then I saw the part about antiblackness and thought, "OK, I see where they got that from". And at the time it looked like someone had informed you but you were ignoring it. If they didn't, and you weren't, that's a different story. I'm sorry you were harassed, I don't agree with that. But you did seem unaware of why it came across so bad.

alright. i am going to outline the two major accusations i think you're talking about - one of which was completely off the wall, and one of which actually was a good critique of my actions, which was then mixed in with all the other accusations.

the first was that i defended a slavery au. that's fucking insane. i never did that. what i DID was not block a user who had created one and later apologized, because the only person who talked with me about it was anonymous. i was not quite as suspicious of anons then as i am now, but friends of mine had been the victim of abusers twisting genuine mistakes and co-opting activist language to isolate and turn people against their victims, so i had a policy of not doing anything based on an anon's word alone, since i couldn't check their credibility. i instead said that i would follow the lead of poc in the community, which i later did by blocking the artist.

in retrospect, it was my whiteness that allowed me to give them the benefit of the doubt that their initial au was a mistake and that they might deserve a second chance. that was not my call to make. it is also, in large part, because i gave literally everyone the benefit of the doubt. i gave genuine responses to an anon who said i was 'playing the sexual trauma card' three times before i realized they wouldn't listen. that doesn't justify it, though, and was a character flaw as a pushover just as much as it was racist. i was wrong for that.

(as a side note, the anon later cited this discussion on twitter as proof i had 'talked over and refused to listen to' a person of color, as if....i just. had some sort of Spidey Sense that tingled when an anon was white. i still pretty firmly believe that a lot of that discussion came from a basic, widespread misunderstanding of what anonymity fully entails, but that's a conversation for another time.)

the other major accusation is one i will freely admit, as i always have, was a fully warranted and credible one in its original form. i had been commissioned to write a kingston/kugrash fic, and there had recently been a rash of discussion that i had never seen beforehand about the ship being disliked. i was uncertain whether it was inherently racist, and thus if i would need to back out of the project and refund the commissioner, or if this was just a personal issue that people had.

without knowing more about what the problem was, it was hard for me to google 'problematic rat curse shipping' with hope of any actual answers, so i asked an open question about what the specific problem was on twitter (which i did, to my little credit, clarify several times throughout the conversation that no one was obligated to respond to or engage with, and that i was certain the fault was mine for ignorance). another user very kindly and patiently explained to me the importance of canon interracial ships that don't involve white people. i asked what i, at the time, thought was a clarification question about the lack of non-het characters of color to ship in interracial relationships, but what in retrospect was very much a defensive attempt to push through the issue with as little change to my actions as possible. they rightfully called me out on being performative; i apologized and promised to look back on the conversation later and reflect on it.

i learned after the fact that the other person involved was a minor, and upon learning it, immediately deleted all of my part in the conversation. i don't regret that. my memory of that time is too fuzzy to know whether what i said would have damned or aided me, but ultimately, that doesn't matter at all in comparison to making sure that user wouldn't face any of the harassment that i later did. they're one of the other people who i really, truly believe was well intentioned, and whose advice i still take very seriously when reflecting on my actions.

the call out post was made the next day. it was possible to frame it as my 'being informed but ignoring it' by utterly distorting the context of the first accusation, and thus being able to use the second, much more credible accusation to prop it up as more legitimate. i am not going to pretend i didn't make mistakes, because i did, and i will continue to. but i wanted to, and was willing, to learn. i think the fact that i still tried to parse genuine criticisms from harassment even as i actively regressed to my lowest points, and am still trying to more than a year later, is evidence of that.

in the end, though, the veracity of the racism accusations wasn't actually the root of the poster's hatred of me. (i actually recall making a post at the time stating that when i talked about people harassing me, i specifically was not talking abt critiques of my racism, and that i was grateful that people were calling me out and forcing me to adjust my perspective. there was a very clear distinction between people trying to educate me and people trying to hurt me.) what they hated about me was that i wrote nsfw fanfic about aged up characters, and that, when told that this made people uncomfortable, promised to make it easily blockable for them, but did not outright remove them, because i felt that as i was writing about adults in a consenting relationship and the pieces were largely a proxy for delayed-by-trauma exploration of my own sexuality, i didn't feel there was anything inherently immoral about them. thats what they hated me for. that's why i was called a pedophile and a bitch and had my chosen name mocked widely. the poster stated outright thats why they hated me. the accusations of racism were, i believe, largely to pad the post out for people who wouldn't hate me for that alone.

#asks #anon #long post #ask to tag #obvious disclaimer im a human being and thus my memory naturally distorts over time to paint myself in the best possible light #in the same way that im sure the memories of the people who harassed me have largely reframed themselves as Innocents Trying To Inform #i acknowledge that. theres nothing i can do about it. i can say that anything in this post is something that i can confidently say #that multiple third parties can confirm occurred. my opinions are mine but my statements were public #i dont know why tumblr didnt save that last tag when i posted this. tumblrs a functioning website

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