Vertigo or Pursuit of Happyness

For my title sequence project, I am still deciding between doing Vertigo (1958) by Alfred Hitchcock and Pursuit of Happyness (2006) by Gabriele Muccino.

The title sequence for Vertigo is one of the most thrilling and well-created ones and it would be hard to come even close to it. Here's the original title sequence.

It is one of the best and I would love to work on this one. The title uses a lot of animation and I think I can get inspiration from there.

The second movie that I looked at was Pursuit of Happyness because it is one of my favorite films. The movie does not have a specific title sequence but it is a very inspiring movie and I wanted to give it a shot.

Here is the current opening scene of the movie.

I am still deciding between these two and any suggestions are welcome.

History of Titles

On Monday, our name title is doing. I was doing research to figure out what I wanted my brand to be and I came across this video about the history of movie titles. I found it very interesting and I thought I should share it with you all since we will have a project where we have to change a title. Take a look:

I find it so cool to see the progression of technology from the early 1900's to today. We went from still slides to actual cool animations. And just from the few classes that we've had so far I'm blown away what After Effects can do and we've barely touched it. As someone who has no artistic ability, it's cool to see that there are so many possibilities I can do with a program, even if I don't have the talent for it.

Blue Valentine

  I recently watched Blue Valentine for the second time and although the movie had one of the most heartbreaking and intense endings I've ever seen, I enjoyed and thought of motion graphics during the end credits sequence. The shots of the fireworks work great with the emotional stills from the movie and the music syncs up perfectly with the fireworks and shadows created on the still images. Jim Helton and Charles Christopher Rubino were given the ultimatum to use a Grizzly Bear song and received footage from fireworks in Scranton, PA from the director. The end title sequence captures emotion through shadows, light, intense colors, and a powerful song. The movie was extremely powerful and captivating and this end sequence embodies the entirety of the movie. The use of field footage and effects with still images works great and I plan to create something with footage that I've captured outside of the realm of after effects. I think that this title sequence is technically not as advanced as many animated title sequences but appropriate for the movie and very powerful.

Richarg Greenberg and "The Dead Zone"

Richard Greenberg is a motion graphics designer based out of Chicago Illinois.  After getting degrees in industrial design and graphic design he taught for a number of years. He then created a short film entitled "Stop". "Stop" won first prize at the New York Film Festival Student Competition which led to him working under Pablo Ferro. Greenberg then started his own business and has sense created title sequences for Superman, Alien, Dirty Dancing, Death Becomes Her, and The Untouchables. His work is very polished and clean. In The Dead Zone in particular, he does this wonderful, mysterious, slow addition of black shapes in front of some video of a small town. It isn't until most of the way through the sequence that you realize it's the negative space of the title itself. I like this title sequence a lot, because you don't notice anything out of the ordinary immediately. When you first see it you're really only thinking about the peaceful scenery and the quaint town It's a really powerful juxtaposition then, to see "THE DEAD ZONE" spelled out using that same scene. It's simple and it says it all, this town. This beautiful town that everyone has been looking at for 2 minutes now has, with the help of Greenberg and the music become, "The Dead Zone". I really appreciate this fairly subtle imagery in part because it is something I don't see very often in modern movies.

After Effects - Intros and Snow Effects

I really want to get to know After Effects, so naturally I got really distracted by watching videos of a bunch of cool plugins that you can create. I think opening titles can really be great to watch even if you do something simple with them, and I always seem to be become extremely uninterested when the text or opening titles to a movie or project are simple. Here is a cool template I found that I thought were really cool:

Going off of that, I have always been real interested in the plugins side of what After Effects can do, so I looked into some tutorials that would be a challenge yet still be entertaining. There is such a wide array of effects to use on a movie, but given the weather, I figured this tutorial looked appropriate:

Amazing 3D in the Amazing Spider-man

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!