Mark McLaughlin Portfolio - Week 3 and The Pitch

I've now spent a week fighting against the kids' movie.

Essentially it comes down to "I don't want to do it because it's a kids' movie". But right now that isn't the best argument.

So, I gave myself a few minutes to blast out my vision for each of the seven titles so I'd be able to evaluate exactly where I was with each concept.

Bryan Singer made X-Men. Not David Schwimmer. Ross from Friends didn't make any films about mutants. This is embarrassing. I think I thought it was David Fincher. His titles for Fight Club are very much in the same vein: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3JqaMWbOOU

So, I'm doing the kids' movie.

Pirates have been absolutely done to death, and to focus on that theme would require a shedload of illustration. I'm not against the work, but I'm not going to delude myself that I can create a piratical (sp?) style and theme an entire 90 second cartoon around it.

Rather than focusing on that side of the story, I want to set the scene of the film by embedding the audience in the culture of the setting. Rattling Stick's Casino Royale opener gets across the feeling of danger and excitement through the colours and shapes associated with the theme.

This film is set in Jamaica, which has such a vibrant culture and identity that there is tonnes of material for me to draw in in creating this animation.

Creating Jamaican patterns is not going to be as easy as I expected.

The realisation that I could throw myself back into the world of reggae music pleased me greatly.

Having seen so many patterns through my research I wanted to start creating my own. Stealing like an artist has its limits, so by creating my own versions of patterns (something I'm entirely new to) I was able to start visualising what my title sequence would look like.

My initial thoughts are that there will be some story aspect to the animation, following this wee square (representing the main character) to its place in the fabric of the culture.

This was a simple repetition of the colour palette, then when playing around with a green rectangle in the centre, with various elements being ordered forward and backward, I was able to create this flooding effect that, at the time, I felt looked really cool.

Now, not so much.

To start thinking about typography, I took the font used in Cool Runnings and started building words.

I really like the bold, angular way these capital letters are built, but don't want to take the font directly from one of the most famous films about Jamaica.

The Pitch