Prologue for Robin Hood


Prologue’s treatment for Robin Hood is a study in patient analogue work. Ridley Scott called on the studio create Legends to open the film as well as End and Main Titles. Ridley’s vision for the film required Prologue to treat all the type in a handmade fashion, this meant taking the type out of the computer for most of the process and filming and treating them as handmade elements.

What stuck out to me were the gorgeous end titles that Prologue worked on in collaboration with Italian artist and animator, Gianluigi Toccafondo. I spoke with Prologue’s Creative Director on the project, Henry Hobson about their process for type development for the film and how they worked in collaboration with Toccafondo, here is what he had to say:

The type development was key to our work at Prologue, our idea was to echo Tocafondos effect with our typography. Initially we worked with existing fonts but found them too limiting. So we created a complete custom serif typeface to evoke the adventure, romance, promise, mystery qualities of the movie. We printed out each credit, then hand inked each name, working in 4k meant we could really go to town with really fine details. Manija Emran, one of our typographers, then added amazingly intricate custom flourishes to each letter, not just a full alphabet, but also every single character had its own custom flourish, to produce a truly unique type treatment. Even the locator cards had more love poured into them than most title sequences. During the end credits we printed our comped name cards onto non-porous paper then smudged and distorted by hand each name a dozen times, to produce a living hold and hand made transitions. Principally animated by Georgia Tribuiani, the smudged elements really integrated and transitioned the type into a constantly shifting and flowing sequence.

As a side note, when I was browsing through Prologue’s recent list of work one thing began to become apparent to me, their role in film production has evolved. Prologue was once called upon to vignette a film’s story with their personal treatment as a means to both draw the audience into the story as well as leave them with a final impression of the film. Now it seems that Prologue is called upon to envelope the film with a design system that ties the whole world together. Robin Hood, along with Iron Man 2, Sherlock Holmes and Ninja Assassin, are cases of Prologue’s further involvement with establishing a graphic style for a film.

Click here for the full interview as well as the clips


Director – Ridley Scott

Animated illustration -Gianluigi Toccafonda

Creative Director & Design – Henry Hobson

Producer – Unjoo Lee Byars

Typographic Design & Illustration – Manija Emran

Animators – Jorge Almeida, Cris Kong, Georgia Tribuiani, Stephen Villari

Executive Producer – Kyle Cooper

Posted on Motionographer

Ben Julia: Dove Nets

Updated with Q&A

DoveNets_Large

A couple of weeks ago I posted a music video by Ben & Julia for The Main Drag’s song ‘Dove Nets’. Ben (Benoît Créac’h) and Julia (Gaudard) started working together in 2006, and recently moved to Berlin.

There are a few things that made me fall in love with this piece: the diverse illustration/design styles, the use of numerous hand-made pieces, but most of all the ‘Berlinesque’ playfulness of it all.  They have really captured the artistic spirit of the city pretty well in this piece. Although they described this project as a sort of celebration of their recent move, I’m sure this wasn’t their primary aim.

I caught up with the duo, and now have the pleasure of sharing some insight behind their production process with all of you. You can also get more info and credit list on the official site of the video here.

1. What was the brief from the record company/band at the start?

The Brief was clear “Do some Ben&Julia’s crazy stuff “. :-)
No seriously, they really trusted us and we were free to do whatever we wanted. So ‘Dove Nets’ ended up as a surrealistic/psychedelic mix media piece.

2. what were your ideas that came up during your brainstorming process?

We were immediately seduced by the concept of a mouse who’s obsessed with doves. At the beginning the goal was to keep everything real simple, because of the budget and time restrictions, but we couldn’t help writing more new ideas, that’s when the talking books, the eyes in the plug (3rd shot), the Dove Robot, came about. We loved the idea of books telling stories without having to be opened and read!

We are mostly inspired by our travels. Also by dreams, childhood memories,  and TV shows. As an example, for this video,
“Téléchat”– a French TV show from the 80’s, was an important inspiration. “The Storyteller” is also one of our favourites.

Another important subject is the metamorphosis, the kind that Ovid spoke about. Something that’s based in mythology rather than in a new vision of ourselves. The poisoning by the cheese alludes to the use of rat poison. It congeals the blood and kills the rat really quickly. That’s an idea that’s been in our sketchbooks for 2-3 years now.

3. what were the most difficult or unexpected challenges you encountered during the production, technical and otherwise?

We put a lot of work in this music video. Everything was hard and challenging : the animated cartoons, sculptures, plaster bandage, books, and the mouse costume whose ears were made of latex. But we also learned a lot out of this, and that’s really valuable to us. When you make an entire video by yourself, the good thing is that inevitably, there would be some sort of an artistic unity, regardless of whether you wanted this or not.

4. Why did you choose this style/aesthetic and this method?

We mixed all the techniques because this was how we found an “equilibrium”. This is how live action, CG, and puppets can coexist. We try to create ‘Universes’ not ‘animation films’. This is our way to change the world we live in, into a better place…at least for 3 minutes :-)

5. Finally tell us a little bit more about your background and the project…

We are Ben (Benoît Créac’h) and Julia (Gaudard). A French/Swiss duo of Art Director/Director.
Julia studied decoration in Vevey (Switzerland), and Graphic Design in Central St Martin’s, London.
Ben studied editing at CLCF and 3D/Special Effects at Isart Digital in Paris, where he also worked as consultant.

In 2006, we started working as a duo, aiming to create something very original out of clever mixes of all sorts of techniques, be it traditional or digital. We are now represented by Stink. ‘Dove Nets’, which took us 3 months to produce, is our second music video, made as a kind of celebration of our recent relocation to Berlin.

Posted on Motionographer