A 14-year-old scored a dream job thanks to his Lego rendition of the trailer for “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse.”
Preston Mutanga of Toronto animated a Lego-based scene in the box office hit after producers saw his shot-for-shot remake of the trailer and were so impressed they invited him on.
Mutanga released his video in January and quickly drew a Twitter reply from “Spider-Verse” producer Phil Lord.
“Well done!!!” Lord wrote. “Where were you in 2014 oh wait you were 6.”
Another “Spider-Verse” producer, Christina Steinberg, soon got in touch with Mutanga about animating a scene, according to a profile of the teen in The New York Times.
The trailer “blew us all away, including some of the best animators in the world,” producer Christopher Miller told the Times. Lord and Miller also wrote and directed “The Lego Movie.”
Mutanga, who worked remotely on the film and reportedly spent several weeks animating the scene, said his father had shown him animation software he later became “hooked on,” and he taught himself with YouTube videos, according to the Times.
“I adored the first movie and was so hyped for the second one, so getting to work with the people who actually made this masterpiece was honestly like a dream,” he told the newspaper.
“The idea in ‘Spider Verse’ is that a hero can come from anywhere,” Miller told the Times. “And here comes this heroic young person who’s inspired by the movie that was inspired by people like him.”
The film took in over $235 million at the box office, marking the eighth-best opening weekend for an animated film.