In the genre-bending thriller The Spider Within: A Spider-Verse Story, Miles Morales struggles to balance his responsibilities as a teenager, friend, and student while acting as Brooklyn’s friendly neighborhood Spider-Man. After a particularly challenging day living with these pressures, Miles experiences a panic attack that forces him to confront the manifestations of his anxiety and learn that reaching out for help can be just as brave an act as protecting his city from evil.

ABOUT

The Spider Within: A Spider-Verse Story was developed and produced in the inaugural year of Sony Pictures Animation and Sony Pictures Imageworks’ Leading and Empowering New Storytellers (LENS) program, a 9-month leadership training program that provides candidates from underrepresented groups with an opportunity to gain valuable leadership experience in animation. The final deliverable of the program is an all-original short film, set in the existing world of a feature produced by SPA and SPI.

The LENS program is backed by Sony Pictures Entertainment’s global, multi-pronged racial equity and inclusion strategy, Sony Pictures Action. The program’s goal is to provide creatives who have traditionally lacked access to leadership roles with a first-hand opportunity to deepen their understanding of every element of the animated filmmaking process including production design, animation, visual effects, lighting, sound, and various post-production processes. Through the program, participants strengthen their ability to effectively articulate their film’s creative vision and collaborate across a variety of disciplines.

The Spider Within: A Spider-Verse Story is directed by Jarelle Dampier and written by Khaila Amazan, and produced by LENS program creators Michelle Raimo-Kouyate and David Schulenburg. Rounding out the LENS team are Clara Chan who served as vfx supervisor and Joe Darko who served as animation supervisor.

Sony Pictures Animation has teamed up with the Kevin Love Fund to digitally release the animated short film that will be incorporated into the Kevin Love Fund’s new mental health focused lesson plan, “The Hero Within.” The lesson plan invites students to tell their own story through the lens of mental health awareness via an interactive curriculum including a creative storyboard activity. Visit kevinlovefund.org for additional information. 

The KLF education team developed the new lesson for their free, evidence-based curriculum to encourage students to share a challenging experience from their lives by writing and illustrating their own series of storyboard panels, similar to the way the LENS team used storyboards to develop an early version of the story portrayed in The Spider Within. KLF’s creative arts mental health curriculum launched in the fall of 2022 and currently has 15 lesson plans. The curriculum, which is offered in three languages, has been taught to over 55,000 students so far, and is now available globally. Proceeds from the campaign will benefit The Kevin Love Fund and the scaling of their educational curriculum.