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.
“Well done!!!” Lord wrote. “Where were you in 2014 oh wait you were 6.”
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.”