Laura Ziskin and Avid Arad called upon Kyle Cooper and his company Imaginary Forces to create a prologue for their film adaptation of Stan Lee’s original comic Spiderman. Sam Raimi, a fan of Cooper’s darker work, this time aimed to create an opening that would get audiences, especially young audiences, excited at the outset, rather than spooked. Cooper, whose work often embraces typographic puns, this time involved flying letterforms that were being caught in animated webs, like struggling flies. As the prologue progresses, the 3D webs begin to transition into the grid of the city’s architecture, as well as the patterns on Spiderman’s familiar costume. Additional computer generated imagery involved churning cells, representing the metamorphosis going on inside Peter Parker’s body as it begins transforming internally, after he is bitten by a radioactive spider. The final shot of the sequence features a 3D animated cobweb that seamlessly transitions into the first live action shot.
