With lest than 2 months to the release of The Good Dinosaur, I want to make my Title sequence for this film. There's plenty of information avalible about the film online, but I wanted to try my hand at making a short Title sequence for the film. I wanted to share some of my ideas and give an Idea of the style I'm going for:
Firstly, the Two Trailers:
The Trailers give the most amount of information out there, specifically the story. As I blogged about last week, this pixar piece has alot of work put into the terrain and landscape. With all the focus on the Water especially, I wanted to use a mixture of fluid dynamics and 2D shapes to move around the names of the title sequence.
Basing alot of the style on the title sequence from Monsters, Inc.,
my plan is to use basic shapes of ovals and circles to show the characters, and keep the piece almost flat.
I also Want to try making some Text flow away as if it's in a stream:
and I'm pretty sure I found a Tutorial for how to make it work in Maya Here:
Below is a list of all the references I'd like to include in my Title Sequence:
Fireflies
Comet
Arlo the Dinosaur
Spot the Boy
Raging Water
Crystals
rushing past Vast amounts of land and sky.
I'll keep you up to date on the rest of the project as I go.
I really like it when trailers don't give away the entire plot of a film. It's something that's becoming less and less common; movie trailers now, on average, are around two and a half minutes in length and usually give away the funniest lines, coolest moments, and main plot points of a film. It's annoying. Which is why I find it so refreshing when I find a trailer that manages to pique my interest while simultaneously not really giving me anything to work with.
Case in point with one of the trailers going around for the new stop-motion animated movie The Boxtrolls. 75% of the trailer is basically a "making of" video; giant hands sculpt tiny details onto clay faces, animators walk through the small-scale cities that they've made, things like that. It's insightful, and a way to show audiences the faces of characters that they'll be seeing in the film without giving anything away. You see some of the finished product at the end of the trailer, but only the animation; nothing about the story is revealed.
I thought that this was a great marketing tactic. It succeeded, at least, in getting me to do a little research on the film to learn a bit more about it. The Boxtrolls is based off of the 2005 children's book Here Be Monsters!, which was written and illustrated by Alan Snow. The plot summary, in one sentence via IMDB, is this: a young orphaned boy, raised by underground cave-dwelling trash collectors, tries to save his friends from an evil exterminator. Ok, now you've really got my attention.
The company behind the film (Laika, which - fun fact - is based in Portland Oregon and run by Travis Knight, the son of the co-founder of Nike) is the same company behind Coraline and ParaNorman, two really great - and kind of creepy - stop motion films. One of the directors, Graham Annable, has worked as a story artist on ParaNorman and - curve ball - as a clean up artist for The Goofy Movie. The other director, Anthony Stacchi, also directed Open Season, and worked in the VFX department of Antz and James and the Giant Peach.
With a cast that includes Elle Fanning, Ben Kingsley, and Simon Pegg, I'm gonna go out of my way and say that this will be one of the best animated movies of 2014. You heard it here first.
So this weekend a friend and I went to see, you'll never guess...The Hunger Games :-) And yes the 3D animation used to create the Capitol and other VFX was awesome in this movie too. However, what stood out to me even more was the sneak peek I got for the 3D work that has been done on the new Spider-man movie due to be released this summer. Not surprisingly the storyline and writing appear to be relatively weak but visually the movie looks awesome. Having taken Special Topics in 3D last semester I know exactly how difficult it is to make even a simple character using 3D animation, let alone design an entire city. While, I don't think watching this trailer on a computer screen really does the effects justice, seeing them in the theater was impressive. Not because the effects were flashy and in your face but because the design of the city and especially the shot at the very end where the radio antenna falls look so real. If you're not in the business of animation or movies then you probably wouldn't even know right away that it was computer generated. Keeping in tune with the legendary status of the last few Spider-man movies even the titles in the trailer are well designed and I'm excited to see what they come up with for the opening sequence!
