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The Titles in Adventures of Tintin

January 31, 2025 / Oliver Hale

Titles are never something I thought about until watching this movie. It felt like it introduced the character so well, even though I was already aware of the character of Tintin, I fell in love all over again. the style and the simple silhouetting and composition just added to the vibe so well.

while i couldn’t find exactly what inspired Denis Yoo to make such an incredible title card, i did learn a lot more about him.

Dennis has been in the VFX and animation game for 20 years now, starting off his career with Weta FX, animating creatures in the Lord of the Rings and Avatar (the blue one) When Weta FX was hired to help design and make some of the visual effects for Adventures of Tintin, I can only speculate how his job of designing the title sequence fell into place.

Since there have been no clearly stated inspirations, I can only pull from what I know Weta FX has worked on. One of which is the intro and credits for Disney’s The Jungle Book. While Dennis was not on this project, I’m sure he took inspiration from it in terms of developing his composition for the Adventures of Tintin title screen.

Although there is no official inspiration stated, I can take a guess. i looked for other examples of comics that were then adapted into film. such as in Batman the Animated Series. I picked this one in particular because of its strong use of silhouetting.

while looking for more information about comic book-esque title sequences I came across this interview by the creator of Aeon Flux, Peter Chung. to my surprise he had mentioned Herge the author of the original Tintin comics

I [peter] was looking at a lot of Moebius at the time, I had actually gotten to know him and work with him on a project early in my career. I really admired and was inspired by him as an artist. What I love about his approach to comics and graphic illustration in general is that it has a clarity to it. The term in French for that is “ligne claire”, which means clear line. The main practitioner of that was Hergé, the creator of Tintin. It’s a style that’s very descriptive, and what that means is approaching the subject with a certain amount of graphic neutrality.

while it is unknown how much of the original comics inspired the intro style in Adventures of Tintin, I do know that art comes full circle if you let it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZfwSyWhhGc&ab_channel=dedevovo31

sources

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0983193/fullcredits/?ref_=tt_cst_sm

https://www.artofthetitle.com/title/the-adventures-of-tintin-2011

https://www.wetafx.co.nz/about/people/animation-supervisors/dennis-yoo

https://www.artofthetitle.com/title/aeon-flux

Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events

January 31, 2025 / Odi Sogard

The title that I chose is, Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events (2004). The Lead Animator was Benjamin Goldman.

The reason that I chose Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, is because it is one of my all time favorite movies from when I was a child, and still is to this day (I also like the Netflix series). I remember watching it every halloween and whenever I had finished one of the books.

As for inspirations for Benjamin Goldman, I couldn’t find anything besides the fact that he was always intrigued by the magic of stop-motion ever since he was young, leading him to create Paper Ocean Pictures. His company has done other opening titles and ads for The History Channel and A&E. he has also done some digital shorts. one of which is Summer Love.

Works Cited

https://www.paperoceanpictures.com

Animated Titles- Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs

January 31, 2025 / Tom Kuebler

“You know what you are, Flint Lockwood? A shenaniganizer! A tomfool!”

I chose the sequence in Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs (the first one) released in 2009!

I love this movie so much, it’s one of my favorites so I had to do it for this!!!! Todd Hemker was the co-director for it and it was produced by Yellowshed and DUCK studios.

My starting inspiration was literally just that this movie is always sort of lurking in the back of my mind and when the topic of the week was announced to be title sequences it popped back into my head. It’s overall a super fun film and it’s actually really well done besides just the ending (which is awesome).

However I do NOT like the second movie. It was not really up my alley and I believe they definitely got sidetracked by the need to profit, which ended up making the sequel less enjoyable. (this isn’t really relevant to my blog but I feel like I need to state it because I do believe the second movie had so much potential if they had just taken a different direction with it)

A few main inspirations I was able to find were things like Muppets, Schoolhouse Rock, Monty Python, etc…… It has a very fun, surreal aesthetic that mixes very colorful cartoony graphics and characters with oddly realistic elements like the rendered hand combined with sparkly rainbow animation. It gives the sequence a very childish and whimsical vibe that also pays homage to looking more like paper animation in some parts. The “Trail” as Briana put it in class goes more in the direction of old and silly animation and using that to combine with the modern animation of the time- (it WAS 2009, so of course it’s a little outdated now).

Something I found really interesting was that the original plan for the animatic was basically completely scrapped due to timing issues. Because they had to get each persons’ name on screen for the same amount of time, they had to change their original mayor animatic to one that featured the characters outside of it and each one had to have somewhat subdued animation so it didn’t take away or distract from the credit names. It sucks to me that they had to waste potential good character animation that would really show each of their personalities so that the credits could be seen in more focus, but I guess that’s part of compromising in order to make sure you get what you want- still I think it’s sad, but it’s still such a great ending sequence regardless

WORKS CITED:

Wholahay Animation. “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs Ending Title.” Blogspot.com, 31 Jan. 2025, r-wong253249-sp.blogspot.com/2014/04/cloudy-with-chance-of-meatballs-ending.html. Accessed 31 Jan. 2025.

Ulloa, Writer Alexander, et al. “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs.” Www.artofthetitle.com, www.artofthetitle.com/title/cloudy-with-a-chance-of-meatballs/.

“Todd Hemker & Soyeon Kim.” The Art of the Title Sequence., 2025, jemmayarkertitlesequence.weebly.com/todd-hemker–soyeon-kim.html. Accessed 31 Jan. 2025.

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Art Of The Title | Spider-man Homecoming

January 31, 2025 / Romie

I chose Spiderman Homecoming because I love the movie and it was one of my favorite Marvel movies. I thought the Intro had lots of style and creativity, which made it an appealing choice.

This title sequence was animated by Handel Eugene, a Haitian-American based in San Francisco, who also animated the intro to Black Panther. He works with a lot of multimedia elements in his animations. (Other animators on this title sequence include Ilaria Cacace and Justin Molush.)

I know we were supposed to go down inspirational rabbit holes for this project- however I actually had a really hard time doing that. My original title sequence was going to be the Deadpool opening, however there wasn’t a lot of other media to choose from for direct references that the animators chose, and there was a lot of terminology I just didn’t understand all together. This was a similar experience with this intro- where there wasn’t any real place to find information about the making of, which was rather disappointing.

That was… until I finally found gold.

I found the original concepts, and that lead me to Perception Studio- and a part of their website! Tucked away under past projects and awards- they had a making of and concepts for this title sequence.

The main goal of this title sequence was to illustrate the vibes that one would get from the surrealist feel of a day in the life as spiderman- they wanted to illuminate bright colors and a more peppy attitude.

Claymation was an instant go-to, as it really felt organic, and brought out a very real and almost childish approach to the Spiderman character, illuminating the fact that yes, he is still a highschooler! Painting it in a less gritty and more up-beat light.

Another approach they considered was a pop-punk DIY poster effect, which didn’t really make the final cut, but rather combined with one of their other elements (Illustrated Daydream) to blend into the story elements of Zendaya’s character MJ’s art and doodles throughout the movie.

I like this above look- and think that if there was a SpiderPunk movie, (yes please, btw), this would be a great look! It reminds me of early Gizmos-

In the end- the real inspiration from the title sequcne came from the idea of a day-to-day life spiderman, and vignettes from the movie that painted spiderman as a Friendly Neighborhood Spiderman.