Scott Pilgrim vs. the World

One of the best opening sequence for a movie that I have seen is the opening for Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. This movie was based on the graphic novel by Bryan Lee O'Malley and the film adaptation was produced and directed by Edgar Wright. Since the film was based off of a graphic novel, the movie has a comic-like style to it. This is shown especially well with the inclusion of motion graphics and animation throughout the film. The movie is a hybrid of a movie, a graphic novel, and a video game. Scott Pilgrim is a zany story so the unrealistic animations do not distract from the feel of the film. Here is the opening title sequence:

This title sequence sets the mood for the entire movie. Each time an actor/actress's name comes up, the animations gives clues to the character and foreshadow the events to come. It is fast-paced, colorful, and it showcases the music (which is one of the major parts of the movie). It's fun and it is also great animation.

Scott Pilgrim is Possible!

This week I'm posting about Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. This is a movie based on a graphic novel and because of that it incorporates a lot of graphic novel and video game elements as effects. I enjoy this movie quite a bit because of these elements and how the effect the look and feel of the movie. There's a lot of effects used to add excitement to the film by making it feel really fast paced and choppy. More importantly I feel like a lot of these effects are totally replicable with the skill set we now have in After Effects. I post a lot about effects like this, by that I mean effects we are able to replicate, but that's because I think it's really cool. Being able to look at a movie like this and say "I could do that" is pretty cool. granted it takes a lot of work to mimic anything like this but with the exception of the flaming sword I think it's all stuff that we've gone over in class. There's a lot of 2D elements layered over the video track, like the "LEVEL UP" graphic and the others like it. Those are things we could make in Photoshop or Illustrator and incorporate into  a movie with ease. I just can't believe how cool effects like this are so simple to create. Don't get me wrong, it's a lot of time effect to put these things together but it's totally doable with what we know now.

Sin City

In 2005, the movie Sin City, staring Mickey Rourke, Bruce Willis, and Clive Owen, premiered on hundreds of silver screens around the country. I remember learning that it was based on Frank Miller's graphic novel (well, more like a series of graphic novels) and I couldn't help but be completely spellbound with its animation. I had never seen another movie that had taken live action and completely transformed it to look like a comic. Most of the action is highly concentrated black and white with a few chosen colorful objects, and I couldn't wrap my head around how they could possibly do that with a film. Well its 6 years later, I have learned a few tricks and gained a little more experience in the industry, yet I am more impressed with the process they used to create the movie, as well as the techniques they used in order to achieve the detail of the original graphic novel.

If we look at the original panels from the book and compare it to the final product, we see the detail that went into the entire production design.

The costume designers were so precise that the placement of the bandages on Marv are actually in the exact same place on the book character as they were for the film character. Then if we look at the process that the artists and filmmakers used to enliven the graphic novel, we see exactly how much work had to go into the animation. Computer generated sets, color correction, and 3-D elements were just the beginning for this project.

Everything from the white rain...

...to the black and white high contrast look of the graphic novel was CG.

After learning how to key green screens and garbage mat everything outside, I realize how simple this process can be. However, it is still an incredible amount of work for an entire movie, and to create the entire world on a computer is just incredible.

Here's another example of how much CG was used in the very first scene. Notice the color correction, color selection, texture, and set.

Before:

After:

This is just a small portion of the effects used in this movie, but if anyone feels like exploring more, Animation World Network has a full 6 pages spread dedicated to the work that went into making this graphic novel a silver screen spectacle. I would highly recommend reading it as it goes into details about the project, what they used, and how they used it to created this graphic world.