Scott Pilgrim vs. The World

I watched this film a year ago and was blown away by the animations and special effects. Now getting a slight insight on creating animations and special effects like this, I am really impressed with this film. Not only is it a strong and funny story that appeals to the gamer in all of us but it's simply fun to watch. In reality, this film doesn't entirely even have to have a great storyline because it's so entertaining to the eye. They have a lot of over the top animations in the film that maintain it's game-like feel.

I can't even imagine the amount of green screen, tracking, and hours of sitting on a computer that went into this film. Overall I thoroughly enjoyed this film and would recommend it to anyone looking for something fun and easy to watch. Also Michael Cera is great in this and really fits the roll perfectly.

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.

Work in Progress

I thought I would use this blog post as an opportunity to give in update about my projects. I'm nearly done with my Scott Pilgrim vs. the World project, but it's not turning out exactly as I hoped it would. I was expecting it to be more flash, more fast paced but due to time constriction, I don't have time to fix all that. The main this is that I was able to incorporate the comic books into it. All I have to do and fine tune it and it'll be done. As for my "name" project, I don't have a lot done with it because I've been spending all my time on my other projects. In the end it'll probably be very short and very simple. Hopefully I'll have everything ready by the screening.

Extreme Detail Used in Movies

So a few of my friends were sending around this article that Cracked.com just put out. It's called "7 Movies That Put Insane Work Into Details You Didn't Notice"and it shows some rather nice work.

The first one they list is a movie that we talked about in class and actually had a chance to view the process of the title sequence: Se7en. We got to see a little more than what Cracked talks about, but the article does talk about how the creators wrote the journal entries, found and attached pictures, and actually bound the pages together.

Continuing on, Cracked.com talks about a beautiful animation that I have never even heard of. The Thief and the Cobbler, which inspired Disney's Aladdin, was written and directed by Richard Williams. It was about 30 years into the making, but was never finished. Animation World Network Magazine even had an article on it in 1997 talking about the work and background of the story.

Now even if you don't read the article, you should definitely watch this animation because the detail is really quite amazing.

Cracked.com continues on the examine Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, Stanley Kubrick's Filmography, The Matrix, Ghostbusters, and finally Akira Kurosawa's Entire Filmography. 

The article is a bit short and not as detailed as I would like it to be, but it definitely opened up my eyes a bit more to the detail that goes into these movies. I've watched Ghostbusters since I was a kid and while I knew that the terms they were using were real, reading the article really emphasized how each director, writer, designer, creator, and producer should really look into even the simplest details in order to make a production that much better. When creating something, no matter what your job is, the project will always come out better with a little more research. Not only will it make it more realistic, but sometimes it will even inspire you to create something else. Detail may seem futile or unnecessary, even out of the budget, but creating something with such depth can really pay off in the reception of the final product.

Scott Pilgrim vs. The World

As a last minute decision, I've decided to use Scott Pilgrim as my material for this project. I came across this interesting article that goes into depth about the visual effects in the movie and the style behind it to give it that comic book feel. The article mostly focuses on the fighting sequences in the movie and how they incorporated and copied the actions that happened in the actual graphic novel. It's a very interesting article and I found it extremely helpful when researching the topic for my project. The link it below!

Scott Pilgrim and VFX Against the World

Project Ideas

I'm not sure exactly what I want to do for this project, but I do have a few ideas. Two of them include the movies (500) Days of Summer, and the other is Scott Pilgrim vs. The World



The (500) Days of Summer opening right now is very simple, and very nice. I will most likely shoot my own footage for this project, but I still don't know what I want my opening sequence to be. I just love the movie and I know I could have a lot of fun with it.



The opening sequence to these movies are already amazing, which is slightly intimidating when you're a young college student in your first motion graphics class. What I hope to do for Scott Pilgrim is insert parts of the comic book into the opening.

Those are my two ideas and I haven't committed to either one just yet. Let me know what you think!