Digital Kitchen: The Company Titles
New work is often posted in waves, and such is the case for recently featured Digital Kitchen. Their title sequence for mini-series The Company is a beautifully atmospheric piece that shows DK’s diversity of style and sensitivity to subject matter.
I asked producer Colin Davis a couple questions about the project, and he supplied some nice details:
Technique:
The technique was a hybrid of procedural and hand-done cell animation. Technically speaking, this is a mixture of 3D animation with both procedural (2D + 3D + Hair + Ink + Particles) and hand drawn cross-hatching. All the rabbits were hand-sketched — we literally took every other frame (12fps) into Photoshop and drew on top.Timeline:
The whole main title process lasted from August through early June, but for the final product shipped, the hard-core production lasted about 12 weeks.
DK’s attention to detail and love of the craft is obvious. Oh, and the typographic choice of Caslon was a nice, classic move. For a show about the CIA, they could have gone an entirely different route, opting for more of a Mission Impossible sans serif, something that screams “THIS SHOW IS ABOUT SPIES!”
Thank god they didn’t.
CREDITS
Creative Director:
Matt Mulder
Lead Designers:
Cody Cobb
Ryan Gagnier
Designer:
Noah Conopask
Animatiors:
Ryan Gagnier
David Holm
Pete Kallstrom
Matt LaVoy
Dayvd Chan
3d:
Cody Cobb
Character Animators:
Igor Choromanski
Gordana Fersini
Editor:
Dave Molloy
Producer:
Jill Johns
Colin Davis
Executive Producer:
Mark Bashore
Tuesday, August 7th 2007 at 12:16 pm |
This has a great look.
Anyone here watched the show? Is it good?
Tuesday, August 7th 2007 at 12:32 pm |
I agree, this looks fantastic. The style is amazing and the last couple of transitions are really well done too. DK always been consistent with their work, it really seems to always be really good.
Tuesday, August 7th 2007 at 2:36 pm |
Thank you! We coughed up a lot of nights and weekends and months for this…nice to finally see it out there. I’m almost to the point where I can watch it again.
I uploaded one of my boards and some R&D tests for this project to my Flickr, if anyone is interested:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/vectorsnob
Tuesday, August 7th 2007 at 3:26 pm |
Very nice, well executed! good work DK.
Tuesday, August 7th 2007 at 6:48 pm |
vectorsnob, what–in particular—made the process stretch out for so long? (August till early June?)
The 12-week turnaround (hardcore production) sounds quite reasonable, on the other hand…
very nice stuff….reminds me of the work of the Australian illustrator Shaun Tan–in particular ‘The Arrival’ :
http://www.shauntan.net/books.html (click on ‘The Arrival’ to see images)
Tuesday, August 7th 2007 at 7:54 pm |
Great stuff I’m going to have to check out the show for sure now. Looks like the show started this week. KGB you might have to check it out…
“Three friends are recruited out of college, becoming agents of the CIA and KGB.”
vectorsnob - Thanks for the look at the boards!
Tuesday, August 7th 2007 at 9:10 pm |
Dudes… nice job.
Wednesday, August 8th 2007 at 3:06 pm |
Lillian - There was quite a bit of time between the original boarding phase and the actual execution. I remember completing boards sometime in September and starting the animatic earlier this year.
Wednesday, August 8th 2007 at 6:41 pm |
ah I see! thanks for the info, and for the peek into the process…
Thursday, August 9th 2007 at 12:14 am |
Very nice. It’s so good to see the final piece…
Thursday, August 9th 2007 at 11:49 am |
good
Thursday, August 9th 2007 at 4:08 pm |
That made me really want to watch the show. Very good work.