In the 2021 blockbuster “Spider-Man: No Way Home,” audiences can see the titular webslinger swing, fight and jump from one expansive set piece to the next.
And among the hundreds of people responsible for the film, which has grossed $700 million and counting, one is a Lancaster County native.
Eagle-eyed Marvel fans, already known to wait through the credits for an Easter egg or trail of breadcrumbs towards the next comic book movie, can see the name “Daniel Enrique De León” among the 15 modeling artists responsible for making the improbable, realistic.
“There’s no real distraction, it’s more like a weird, super unique spike of dopamine when you’re watching the movie and you think, ‘Oh, I remember working on that shot, but I was looking at it in my monitor and it didn’t look this good,” says De León, 39, about watching his work on the big screen.
De León who has lived in Los Angeles with his dog, Ein, since 2014, has been working in the field of VFX(visual effects) for close to two decades. The path was not a straight one – at one point, De León was a double-major at Millersville University, primarily working towards a biology degree.
“Whenever I tell people that I majored in biology and art, they’re like, ‘How does that work?'” de León explains. “They always think, ‘Medical illustrator!’ and I’m like, ‘Hell no! That is boring and limiting, and you’re constrained by the body and what it looks like.’”
De León’s journey started, as it does so often with young boys, as a childhood fascination with dinosaurs. Michael Crichton’s “Jurassic Park” novelization came first, and De León devoured the book with the help of his older sister, Ruth. Enrique, De León’s father, introduced Daniel to films like “Gremlins,” “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and “Aliens,” jumpstarting a lifelong appreciation for film.
“I felt like I had such a great curated set of movies as a child,” De León says. “And then, of course, he exposed me to a few movies that were definitely too early for me as a child, but I didn’t know any better and loved them.”
When at last the “Jurassic Park” film premiered in June of 1993, the elder and younger De Leóns went to see it, with family friend Brad Igou in tow. Igou met the family when Enrique emigrated to the United States from Guatemala and Igou was teaching English as a second language at the York Spanish American Center. The De León children were born when their parents moved to Pennsylvania.
“When I was a kid, I was a big dinosaur fan, too. It’s funny how dinosaurs stay in the consciousness of little boys, I guess,” says Igou, remembering the fateful trip to the movies. “We all loved ‘Jurassic Park.’”
The wrinkles and scale of the dinosaurs in the movie heightened De León’s early love for realism as opposed to stylized art. When he was even younger, De León and his sister would watch Disney movies, pause them to draw the scenes and characters, and then unpause to continue the film.
“Many artists will tell you that it’s the wrong way to go about art —you want to do the broad sketch first, and then you refine it and it gets more detailed, similar to sculpturing,” De León says. “But as a kid, I would often get obsessed with details.”
Though De León’s parents were supportive of his artistic endeavors, De León’s father suggested that he get into medicine, as the elder De León had wanted to be a doctor at one point.
De León would, briefly, have his cake and eat it, too, by majoring in art and science at Millersville. In college, De León also worked in the ER at Lancaster General Hospital, often leading to all hours of his days being accounted for with some type of work.
“I would study my books, fall asleep on those, wake up and finish my drawings for Drawing 2, pull that together, go to class, finish up, work near eight hours in the ER, then go home and do it all over again,” De León describes. “It was way too much.”
California love
Feeling the emotional weight of long nights in the ER, De León dropped out of Millersville in his junior year in 2002. Around that same time, the world of visual effects got a boost through the release of ZBrush, a digital sculpting tool.
“Anything computer-generated that you see in a film, especially something organic-looking, 99% of the time it started life as a 3D model in ZBrush, because it’s such naturalistic sculpting, almost like you’re working with clay on a computer,” De León says. “There’s a steep learning curve, but the basic idea is just knowing this one option makes you add material, then this other tool inverts it and scrapes out data.”
During this time, De León held a day job of creating wood and stone patterns for Ikea furniture with online ZBrush masterclasses. Soon enough, De León would not only take masterclasses, but also asked to help moderate and teach classes. Through his work for ZBrush parent company Pixelogic and the Stan Winston School of Character Arts, De León was beginning to make the necessary connections towards a career in VFX. Thanks to a freelance gig in 2013, De León was able to procure his first 3D printer, which helped him land a gig at Sight & Sound Theater creating models for its “Moses” show.
On weekends, De León would travel to conventions such as 3D Printer World Expo and the SIGGRAPH Conference. One connection made on these trips proved to be invaluable. Michigan native Solomon Blair worked at Pixelogic for several years before meeting De León, who struck him as particularly motivated to get into the industry.
“I vaguely remember him talking when he was working at Sight & Sound and just getting into sculpting and building real 1:1 scale figures,” Blair says. “I remember him wanting to make the transition into something bigger.”
After getting to know De León and understanding his passion, Blair made De León an offer difficult to refuse – he invited De León to come to Los Angeles and live in his apartment, rent-free.
“I know plenty of people who weren’t able to make it or stick it out, including people that have passion and skills to make it,” Blair says. “The only thing that they lacked was maybe support or guidance. There’s so many factors that play into it.”
De León hit the West Coast running, creating highly detailed dinosaur models to sell online. After Blair moved out a year later, the 3D-printed dinosaurs and other freelance gigs helped him pay the rent. Eventually, he was able to make connections at Digital Domain 3.0, a VFX company that has worked on movies the likes of “Ready Player One” and “Avengers: Endgame.” Now, while still a freelancer, De León is contributing to the likes of “Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore” and DC’s upcoming “Black Adam,” where he helped create 3D models of star Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson.
And of course, “Spider-Man: No Way Home,” a project that he began work on in 2020.
As a fan of most things nerdy, De León immediately knew the scale of the film, but not all the secrets and spoilers contained within.
“We don’t read the scripts,” De León says. “Those of us who are creating the effects, we’re just seeing the shots that we’re working on and what’s in the department library, but it’s just chunks and snippets. I remember seeing so many shots that I had no context for, in general. I didn’t really have a full idea, but I gathered enough to think that it was going to be pretty good.”
Much of his work on the film was making sure that Spider-Man, played by Tom Holland, moved in a “realistic” way and not, as De León says, like “Gumby.”
“There was an incredible amount of artistry and work that had to go into the shots for everything in motion,” De León says. “You’d sculpt in a bunch of work, and let’s say he’s throwing a huge punch, winding up and coming back down. Right when it’s a quarter of a way around the wind-up, all the geometry and rotations change so much that, the sculptural data that you sculpted when he backed up for the punch, if you let it go past that quarter-point, it would make the arm looks so weird and off.”
“So, you have to stop the instructions for that data, and start a new set from this quarter to the next quarter for the next motion, and again and again when you’re talking about rapid-fire punching, kicking or swinging. Our brain still picks up on whether a human body is still holding the shape of a human body, even while it’s blurred.”
True to his Millersville days of perhaps loading his days down with too much work, De León also recently completed work on an entirely different project – pop star Katy Perry’s new Las Vegas show “Play,” which opened in December and runs until March. Described by De León as “Alice in Wonderland meets “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids,” the stage set pieces consist of items like giant mushrooms and insects and one large, crushed Budweiser can.
Along with his freelance work on stage and screen, De León’s current free time is taken up by a burgeoning interest in augmented reality and his own pet project, a short film based off a pre-existing Sony Playstation game.
End credits
Despite all the projects on the other side of the country, De León returned to Lancaster for the first time in several years over the holidays, where he was able to reconnect in person with Igou.
Igou, sure that De León has already seen “Spider-Man: No Way Home” several times by the time that it was released in December, bashfully asked De León if he’d want to see it at Penn Cinema. Not wanting to make De León point out every detail that he worked on while the film was running, Igou instead asked De León to silently point at the screen throughout, which he did. Nearly three decades removed from one of the key lightning bolt moments of De León’s life, the two sat in the theater at movie’s end, only this time, waiting for one of their own names to appear on screen.
“To me, seeing his name in the credits here, it was just part of that evolution of him following his dream and doing what he wanted to do,” Igou says. “It brings me a lot of joy to see someone who is thriving and enjoying every second — or at least most of the seconds — pursuing the thing that they want to do.”
Though it was a long and winding road to get to this point, de León chooses a different Beatles song to describe how he got to where he is today.
“I love that song by The Beatles, because it’s my life — ‘I get by with a little help from my friends,’” De León says. “Like, yes, I worked my ass off, but I’m also incredibly ingratiated to so many wonderful, obscenely generous and kind people.”
