Attack On Titan

Attack on Titian is a is a Japanese manga series written and illustrated by Hajime Isayama. It was created back in 2009 in Japan and shortly after its realize became very popular. It even became popular enough in western culture that they decided to dub over the audio so that subtitles were no longer necessary.

 What is Manga? Manga is a style of Japanese comic books and graphic novels, typically aimed at adults as well as children. These are commonly turned into television series now days.

This particular story is aimed at older audiences because it is extremely graphic and also deep. The story contains many characters with very complex pasts. The show also likes to keep the audience in the dark to keep the story suspenseful. 

The premise of the show is that humanity has been pushed to the brink of extinction and the only place they are safe is within the walls of a huge castle divided into 3 sections. The antagonists are huge humanoid creatures that are very hard to kill. 

I personally find the show to be a little to graphic at points. It is extremely violent and oftentimes as soon as you become attached to a character they get killed off. The story is written extremely well and the animation is beautiful. I often don't like watching these shows because the action is too slow for me but this show has a very fast pace and great fight scenes. 

I would recommend that people looking for an in-depth story give Attack on Titan a chance even if "you don't like anime".  

It surprised me. 

Making of 'Sin City'

I'm sure most of you have seen the film Sin City, if not read one or several of the comics the film was based on. The animation techniques used in the film give it an aesthetic quality that resembles film noir, while integrating the style of Frank Miller's graphic novels as heavily as possible. Since we are going to be working with green screens, rotoscoping and compositing, I thought it'd be interesting to share how Robert Rodriguez so uniquely captured the essence of the Sin City comics in the film. The use of florescent colored tape and paint while shooting was definitely one of the most intriguing strategies used by Rodriguez. He used it to capture various moments where a high-contrast white was appropriate to match certain elements present in the original artwork (i.e. blood, Marv's bandages, Kevin's glasses, etc.) By shining a blue light against that particular color, it would glow brightly as a result, and a matte could be pulled while in post so that the color could be changed. Also interesting... Elijah Wood's (Kevin) chin was shifted in post-production to create a more haunting look.

Making of Sin City from World of Motion on Vimeo.

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