For the title sequence I wanted to try and be sympathetic to the directors' style of shooting, Wes Anderson has very straight moving and blunt stops in his camera movements, from these camera movements there is an added sense of humour to his work.
At first the added texture onto the designs was just testing it out to see how it was done in illustrator, but I decided to keep it as I though it made the piece look more interesting. This was initially done of the Hotel Key scene.
At first the added texture onto the designs was just testing it out to see how it was done in illustrator, but I decided to keep it as I though it made the piece look more interesting. This was initially done of the Hotel Key scene.
The colours in the movie in the hotel scenes and there outfits are very bold and colourful, but as the movie was suppose to be set in a different era, I wanted to keep the colours on a more pastel, old world shades that still complimented the Director and the Designers creation.
The above scene is the over head view of the carpet and hotel desk in the movie, trying to get just the right shades that complimented the style and the design was had and I am still not fully happy with it. I would probably like to spend more time tweaking this.
The above scene is the over head view of the carpet and hotel desk in the movie, trying to get just the right shades that complimented the style and the design was had and I am still not fully happy with it. I would probably like to spend more time tweaking this.
The hotel lift scene has taken a few changes until I got it to what it looks like now, which i'm happier with since I took out some of the detail as it was getting too busy and the texture and shadows were a bit too over powering so i tamed it all down, its now fitting in better with the rest of the title sequence.
This was the first scene I created for this project to test out and create the overall look for the title sequence, this is where I tested out the use of textures and shadows for the first time.
I think I am drawn to work that is symetrical, In the movie it also seems to be something that the Director has considered in framig the shots. Because of this in the project I've considered the centerings elements like the titles and the objects such as the bridge to be symetrical also.
The difficulty in this scene was trying to get decent looking fingers, once I was happy with one hand I duplicated it and flipped it over for the second hand, there was a bit of trial and error in getting the hands right. The card itself was easy to do, I just tried to match the card from the movie as much as I could then put Edward Norton's details into it.
I think I could do a bit more work on this scene, I find it very bare in this scene once the hand with the apple has gone off screen, or maybe I need to rework the timing on it.
I gave the magnafying glass in this scene a bulge effect and displacement map effect to make it look like a magnifying glass should.
The over head view of this scene was the last scene I created and added to the project, I had a few ideas of what I could put into this section to represent the jail scene of the movie, this works well as the previous scene is of the opening mendl's cake box, but still represents the jail scene.
The snow effect was added in this scene to give another layer of movement to it.
For the close-up scene I created the little Mendl's truck which is such a cute design. I'm in awe with all the fine detail that Annie Atkins and Wes Anderson put into this movie. For the hotel background, I used the same hotel I created below but grew it in size to fit the frame and adjusted the texture so it didnt make it look really pixelated. I know from research into the movie that the far away scenes of the movie was not a real hotel, but a model that they recorded instead, because of this, when it came to the scenes of the movie where the actors were in front of the hotel such as the one above, the front of the building looked different. To save time I used the hotel I created below, but if I had more time I would recreate the front of the building, like they had in the close up scenes like this.
I love how this scene has turned out, it's much nicer than I could have imagined, again though because it has been treated with a texture, it has kind of lost some of the fine detail that I added. If I had more time I would try adding into the bottom foreground the moving hotel lift I had at the beginning to round it all off, this may get too busy though with it , but it may be worth exploring. The background I wanted to keep similar to in the movie poster but again to keep it faded out, so not to take away from the detail of the hotel.
The previous scene transitions into this and it then pulls up like a window blind to reveal the final title that is Wes Anderson's name. I like the subtle texture and the colouring of the text in this that is to represent the gold colour of the hotel sign. This is then like every other scene finished off with a white vignette textured border.
I finished off the alternative title sequence with a re worked version of my old logo ident, it was difficult to get a rendered image sequence that was close to the purple shade that I wanted, so once this was rendered from Maya and added into After Effects, I had add a hue and saturation effect to slightly alter it, as I only though of adding the texture to the logo afterwards, the texture on the logo doesnt move as well as it should.
