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James Bond Title Sequence
Unit Aim
This unit will develop your greater self-awareness and understanding of your creative abilities through an exploration of the characteristics and context of an art and design activity.
Subject Aim:
In this unit you will develop skills in video editing and composition. You will explore a series image manipulation exercises and experiment with green screen filming, colour manipulation, tracking and editing to achieve visually dynamic title sequence compositions.
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The James Bond series of films are famous for their iconic title sequences. The sequences have become stars in themselves and employ cutting edge motion graphic techniques. Fashion, soundtracks and VFX are all important and the overall style
Create a title sequence for a new James Bond film. Choose a name and soundtrack for the film, consider the style, which era it will be, choose a limited colour palette and build a storyboard.
Using Compositing software create motion graphics that capture the essence of a Bond movie.
Research and ideas
Saul Bass was a graphic designer and filmmaker mainly known for his film posters and title sequences as well as working for Alfred Hitchcock and Otto Preminger. He gained fame in 1955 by creating the title sequence for "A man with the golden arm" (Poster seen on right). He was well recognized for his use of Kinetic Typography in his title sequences, a name was given to a technique which uses "moving text", animation of words or sentences to get a message. (An example is seen below on the right.) Though I did love Saul Bass' creativity in use of Kinetic Typography, I was more interested in Visual effects supervisor Steve Begg's work, where he combines old and new visual effects to create Skyfall's opening scene.
My main idea is based on James Bonds award-winning "Skyfall". This is the opening that interested me most. It is quite modern and I enjoyed the smoke effects and weapons falling, and so I hope to recreate a similar gravity scene, I also want to create a skull and set it aflame. I am going to first have the normal barrel scene and then have a desk with weapons displayed on it as though James Bond was selecting his weapon, after this, I will include green screened fight scenes and hopefully a car on fire to subtly hint to a narrow escape.
Steve Begg allso did another of my favourites, casino royale, the title sequence is quite unique.
Below are three examples of real James Bond's title sequences that I plan to take inspiration from. hey range from he oldest, Dr.No to one of the newest, Skyfall. The one that caught my eye the most was Casino Royale, since it used silhouettes and a lot of shots from below, playing with perspective in a unique way. It uses a minimalist amount of colours and colour palette. Similarly to this video I have decided to use colour palettes in my final James Bond Title Sequence as well as to take video footage of action sequences then rotoscope over them to make the characters into interesting and simplistic yet recognizable silhouettes.
James Bond opening sequences are well known for their gun barrel scenes that often take up the first scene. The scene shows the viewers look through the gun barrel as James Bond comes onto the scene, has an action scene and then shoots into the gun barrel, after which a flowing down blood effect appears and covers the audience's vision of the scene. I really like this idea and would like to take my spin on it in my title sequence. My idea is to have the entire opening sequence done from the point of view of a sniper, where the scene doesn't end when he is shot but rather when he shoots at James Bond.
James Bond movies also use projection to show different things on people's bodies or the other way round. It is an interesting technique that can show us, the viewers, what is on the character's mind or what their role will represent in the film. I plan to use this idea however instead of projecting it on people's bodies I plan to use the silhouettes. Each time a character would be introduced or died, what they wish for the most will be projected on their silhouettes instead of the plain black ink. I hope this will add depth to my sequence as people will be able to possibly relate to the characters even though they've only just seen them appear on the screen.
Skyfall (2012) is the twenty-third spy film in the James Bond series produced by Eon Productions. It features Daniel Craig in his third performance as James Bond, and Javier Bardem as Raoul Silva, the villain.
A cryptic message from the past leads James Bond (Daniel Craig) to Mexico City and Rome, where he meets the beautiful widow (Monica Bellucci) of an infamous criminal. After infiltrating a secret meeting, 007 uncovers the existence of the sinister organization SPECTRE.
Armed with a license to kill, Secret Agent James Bond sets out on his first mission as 007, and must defeat a private banker to terrorists in a high stakes game of poker at Casino Royale, Montenegro, but things are not what they seem.
soundtrack ideas
I chose three possible soundtracks for my final idea. It was very hard to narrow down all songs down to only a couple options since so many fit the part. James Bond is known for using popular soundtracks that fit it's theme in the opening sequence, hence why I chose the three songs that I thought it'd be quite easy to direct to and to which action sequences could take place. They had to be quite upbeat and either popular or fitting my theme of "Desires" since I named my project "House of Desires".
moodboard
I have chosen very specific images for my Moodboard since they'd help me get a better understanding and grasp of what I was doing with my opening sequence. Each image represents what I will incorporate in my final version of this unit, or at least what I am planning to achieve. Moodboards are often used by any sort of artistic profession to establish the basics, time saving and help you work out what resources you will need to achieve your goal (They are occasionally also called inspiration boards).
Colour Pallette
wanted to choose a colour palette that I found online to limit the colour use I will have during my opening sequence. Similarly to James Bond's "Casino Royale" I wanted to use black and white silhouettes on top of simple yet clustered background which uses a specific colours that go with the theme. I plan to go with aboriginal art inspired colours or something similar to the water/air theme that Skyfall had. I could possibly choose to go with two or all of the above colour palettes and simply use each new one for a different scene (zoom into window that represents a new scene beginning as well as a new mini story).
Story board
I have only drawn out the first scene on paper since each scene is surprisingly similar and is better off written down in words, except the last which I also included a drawn version of.
In the first scene we will have a birds eye view on a four story building. The background will be completely black and the building will be red bricked. All of the lights in the widows will be turned off. The camera then zooms into the top left window and music starts playing. The light turns on. The atmosphere is very much similar to that of a sneaking scene in 'pink panther' movies/series.
The windows light presents us with a lovely yet simple scene. Two pitch black, rotoscoped, silhouettes of a man and a woman eating dinner. The background image is similar to clips that played in Casino Royale, moving images of coins and cards with simple palette. The woman presented tries to take out her gun and shoot Bond, however he is quicker to react and shoots her instead. Her silhouette turns from black to the slowly moving image of coins falling, revealing the deepest desires the woman had; wealth. The light turns off and camera zooms out of the window and starts up again where it all began.
In the second shot the camera repeats it's action however with a window across and down. The light turns on to reveal Bond running into the scene with two men trying to attack him. He throws one over his shoulder and shots him while he's on the floor, then shoots the other in the chest. For the first man, his silhouette turns into an image representing fame and the seconds into one representing world in the light of a strong belief such as communism or religion. I wasn't able to simply come up with sweet or innocent desires when it came to enemies of Bond. I wanted to make it realistic and the hard truth so that it'd make the viewer think at the end of the sequence rather than just leave them with an empty feeling. The bullets used for each scene will actually be kinetic typography, presenting credits as they shoot. The letters will then turn red like blood and bounce off the silhouette to represent their passing. I believe the visual metaphor will be very meaningful rather than just having blood and bullets all around.
In the third scene of my sequence I will repeat the window zoom for the last time in the whole video.
Creating the skull, car, desk and others
For these models I watched several tutorials and adapted my own techniques so that the models were unique to myself.
Originally I gave the skull more detail, as you can see in the last video, however the college mac computer could not handle the polygons on the model and it wouldn't stop crashing. So I decided to use the less detailed model of the skull, (before I modelled the crack in the skull and detailed more shape in Mudbox) which is the skull in the first video showing its creation.
The car model took around 8 days to model as I would plan each section of the car to model in parts. The sections would comprise of things such as the back, the wheels, the hood/bonnet, the interior, details such as the aston martin logo or the gratings, the windshield and number plates, the head and tail lights and finally the texturing.
The weapons were created in separate files and then put together after I designed a desk so that I could make it look like bond was glancing over the desk before choosing his weapon of choice.
The bullets were made so that I can create a scene where they will be falling over, to do this I would use a gravity solver and make them into active rigid bodies.
Evaluation
The main goal of this Unit was to use a diverse range of filming techniques to create a James Bond-style title sequence. I researched the opening titles of Bond films and other films/ TV series that had opening titles, to help provide inspiration to create my own title sequence. The research was very helpful as I could reference techniques used and themes represented in the sequences. Within my project, I used filming techniques such as green screen Keying (filming in front of a green screen and removing the background) and the camera feature in Maya (this allowed me to film the objects I created for my sequence e.g the weapons falling, the desk scene and the car on fire.
I think my final product was very successful in capturing the feel of a James Bond title sequence. The areas I am pleased with are: I remix three songs to create my own soundtrack for the opening sequence which I think blending into the James Bond theme very well. The models I created are quite detailed and you can easily distinguish as to what they are.
Although I am pleased with my sequence there are things I could have improved on; The first thing being that didn’t include backgrounds in my sequence, I also believe that if I did not have so much trouble with Maya and Mudbox crashing (occasionally 3dsMax as well) that the results would have turned out much better, for instance, the weapons falling scene as I had to adapt to the batch render failing 7 times.
If I had extra time I would add a background for each scene, try to fix the problem with the batch render and put more quality into my renders by upping the stats (which in turn would have caused longer render times).