Cutout style animation

This is an interesting animation that I found, put out by Riot Games, creators of the video game "League of Legends". The content isn't all that important, but when I saw it, the animation style really caught my eye. It starts out with the "animation of words" style graphics that Arturo showed in class. Where it gets interesting is when it gets into the animation of gameplay sequences. The point of these animations is to represent gameplay without actually showing recorded gameplay. It is a pseudo-cutout style, and involves a lot of 2d graphics moving around in a somewhat 3d space. The cutout characters move around and do the actions they normally do within the game, but in the cutout style that the video uses. The whole time, the video follows the narrator using the "stream of consciousness" sort of style that this type of video tends to use. It seems to me that one of the harder things about making this video would be making the elements recognizable to players while still making each asset unique. Each action that these "faces with weapons"take is one that is based on the game, and since the video is made for players, needs to be recognizable to them. However, using this 2d cutout style would naturally make this difficult to pull off. Overall, its a very cool animation that accomplishes its intention well.

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang Titles

So after seeing a few posts about opening credits, I tried to think of any other opening title sequences that really stuck out to me in the past. The opening titles from Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (Robert Downey Jr's in it) was the first one I came up with.

Overall, the movie itself was just okay (I had a really high fever when I was watching it, so maybe my judgment was skewed), but I thought the opening titles were really cool. I liked the orange cut-out theme, with the camera moving through the cut-outs to make it 3D, and you can definitely make a title very similar to this using the camera tool in AfterEffects and images that you can zoom past/pan around, etc. In one of the Basic Training videos, Andrew actually teaches you how to make a title sequence where you see one layer of text and zoom past it in 3D space to get to another layer of text. The KKBB credits seem like a more complex version of that, with some line/texture animations thrown in. I really like the camera tool on AfterEffects, and I'd like to use it in my title project, but we'll see how that goes. I've been trying a few ideas and I haven't really been satisfied with any of them so far.

Back to the video- I just looked into the background of it a little more, and apparently the creative director behind the movie is Danny Yount, who has also done title design for Iron Man and storyboarding for Across the Universe. The style of the credits is along the lines of Saul Bass' style.