Prep for my Title Project

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.

The Good Dinosaur

Pixar Studio's newest feature film is arriving in theaters this Thanksgiving, and it will be the first pixar film to be released in the same year as another (ie. Inside Out) Pixar is also not slowing down. In 2016 we'll be getting Finding Dory, the sequel to Finding Nemo, followed by Toy Story 4 and the brand new property, Coco, in 2017.

Either way, Pixar is one to always push the envelope in terms of technical achievements. In Good Dinosaur, the focus was on Environmental Effects. For example:

A Look at foilage from Bug's Life (1998)

A rainy shot of procedurally placed foliage in The Good Dinosaur (2015)

Also Water has seen a whole new breath of realism, using a new algorithm to calculate fluid mechanics. Notice how in Finding Nemo the Water looks to be made more of plastic that the more real photorealistic water from The Good Dinosaur:

Marlin looks for his son in Finding Nemo (2003)

Arlo gets whisked away in photorealistic water in The Good Dinosaur (2015)

Lastly,The film's settings are unlike anything seen in a Pixar movie until this point, with a focus on large and extremely accurate open areas. The film's environments were created using terrain mapping technology to capture the actual geometry of several areas found in the American wilderness and then using that data to recreate photorealistic landscapes for huge areal shots.

The Terrain from Up (2009)

Procedurally Generated Terrain made for The Good Dinosaur (2015) 

With all the added hype surrounding this new feature, and the suggestion to work on title sequences for upcoming films I've decided to try creating a title sequence for The Good Dinosaur. I think creating a Title Sequence from scratch without having a preexisting idea of what the original looks like, I will have much more creative freedom to create my own!

Stimulate Your Senses

So I have been bouncing around through all kinds of cool animated videos on YouTube and various sites for a solid half hour this evening. I came across some super awesome fluid simulation clips for awhile. Much of what I saw seemed to be created with a program called Blender, but there were some others as well. I haven't given much thought to animating liquids before, but the outcomes are mesmerizing. The videos demonstrate all types of things like morphing what appears to be water into shapes like teapots and humans to making liquids "dance" to the beats of music. Some of what I saw reminded me of the clip we watched in class during the first week designed through Processing (where it looked like grains of sand flowing into and out of body shapes). Then all of a sudden I thought of the 5 Gum commercials because many of them have elements that remind me of this type of animation. Specifically the commercials for the React and Rain gums channel the fluid simulation videos I started off watching. The React commercial (which I've included) morphs a black blob into different shapes and the Rain commercial has a giant pool of metallic marbles that pulsate. 5 Gum does a great job marketing in my opinion because those advertisements stick in your mind and make you curious to try their product. But that is beside the point. So I'm left wondering now if After Effects can do any animation that resembles this? Or would Processing be better? I'm not sure, but it'll be something fun to look into!