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Title Sequences

Typophile Film Festival Opening Titles animated with Dragon Stop Motion

Monday, October 5th, 2009

Typophile Film Festival 5 Opening Titles from Brent Barson on Vimeo.

Brent Barson and a team of design students and faculty at BYU created the opening titles for the 5th Typophile Film Festival. The stop motion animation sequences were created with Dragon Stop Motion, the Canon 5D Mark II and the Canon 40D.

The title sequence was recently featured on Motionographer.com

We asked Brent about his experience using Dragon Stop Motion:

“It enabled us to do things I would have thought impossible. Like the ability to load line up images and movies; doing the ‘beauty’ scene without an overlay movie would have been, well, very difficult. The ability to control our Canon Mark II 5D and 40D with it was amazing. And the keyboard shortcuts were essential. It is so obvious that it was made by people who do this exact thing all the time.”

Cinematographer Wynn Burton had this to say about Dragon Stop Motion:

“Hands down I think the best feature is that it lets you shoot in full-res RAW and keeps all your files organized for you. Not that we did a ton in post, but the possibilities for post-editing are unbelievable. Totally opens up stop-motion to be more about composing and making the subject beautiful rather than worrying about the process.

Most of what we shot could never have been done without it—particularly previewing capabilities and easy keyboard navigation.”

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Emmy Award for United States of Tara Title Sequence

Wednesday, September 30th, 2009

United States of Tara Titles from Jamie Caliri on Vimeo.

On Saturday, September 12, Jamie Caliri and his crew won the Emmy for Outstanding Main Title Design. The sequence, produced by Duck Studios, features pop-up book style animation and was shot entirely with Dragon Stop Motion.

Credits:

Executive Producer: Mark Medernach
Director/Designer: Jamie Caliri
Illustrator: Alex Juhasz
Lead Animator: Anthony Scott
Title Producer: Morgan Hay

Check out the previous blog posts about the title sequence:
United States of Tara Title Sequence
More on United States of Tara Titles
Animating on ‘United States of Tara’

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Prologue shoots “Orphan” end titles with Dragon Stop Motion

Friday, July 31st, 2009

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Director Simon Clowes and Director of Photography, Daria Polichetti of Prologue teamed up to create these eye-catching end titles for the horror/thriller “Orphan”. The project was shot using Dragon Stop Motion with a Canon 5D Mark II.

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Daria Polichetti tells us about the project:

The Orphan end credits, designed and directed by Prologue’s Simon Clowes, focus on the main character, Esther, a girl with a secret and a hidden past. But when the darkness falls, Esther’s personal obsessions and malicious intentions are finally revealed beneath the eerie shades of a blacklight.

Derived from the climactic blacklight sequence near the end of the movie (for which the VFX were also designed and produced by Prologue), the main on end sequence for Orphan uses the concept of blacklight photography to reveal credits and hidden imagery lurking just beneath the surface of the scene.

Using Dragon allowed for a great deal of control. The software allowed the team to shoot and edit frames accurately between the regular light the blacklight setup. Multiple channels can be programmed into the software for each take, which allowed the shooting of two light passes simultaneously in a single camera move, saving time in the painstaking process as well as allowing for seamless cuts between the two passes.

Click here to watch the titles on the Prologue site.

Credits:

Designer / Director: Simon Clowes

Producer: Ryan Robertson

Director of Photography: Daria Polichetti

Coordinator: Lee Buckley

Executive Producer: Kyle Cooper

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Digital Kitchen : Seattle International Film Festival

Sunday, April 12th, 2009

Digital Kitchen Seattle just completed this cinematic opener for SIFF. We are so excited to see studios like DK creating fresh, inventive work with Dragon Stop Motion.

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Justin Cone of Motionographer asked Digital Kitchen about their process:

In executing the piece, we created a small set-up in our Seattle studio consisting of two rear-illuminated lightboxes made of 5 panes of glass layered on top of a diffusion layer. Each layer of glass had an element that was either animated frame by frame or was static to create the environment.

For example, a scene might have a layer of diffusion, a painted layer, a layer of characters that we could articulate, and a layer of organic materials, etc. that created the environment. We mounted a Canon Rebel XSi over animation stands, and connected directly to a Mac Pro workstation running the stop-motion software Dragon.

(Although looking at the making-of footage it looks like a Mac Book. Maybe they have two stations?)

Here is a link to the final film.

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Santa Maria’s Stop Motion, CG Hybrid for J&B

Sunday, April 12th, 2009

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Josh Goodrich and David Hill of Santa Maria give us a behind the scenes peek of their J&B ampersand logo set up. We asked them to tell us how Dragon Stop Motion was used in the process.

Dave and Josh:

Dragon software was very easy to set up with the camera we used, a Nikon D90. It also let us go back and preview/edit our footage, which was very important to us, for our amount of experience. The fact that the prop had to move on a turntable was the biggest technical challenge, so to be able to see it working sped up our shooting process.

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We started out with a few animation tests and then went right into shooting the final piece. We had two full days dedicated for the shoot and a week afterward for post. The planning part was very involved because everything had to be blocked out perfectly and in the right order. The sculpture was built by set builder Andy Byers, which came out exactly how it was imagined.

Big thank-you to Josh and David for sharing!

P.S. Dragon Stop Motion is the only stop motion system to pull in the live view from Nikon cameras like the D90. You just plug the Nikon D90 into the computer with one USB cable and you are ready to shoot.

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