Hasta La Motion!

The Making of Watchmen’s Dr. Manhattan and The Tech Behind Rorschach’s Mask, at Popular Mechanics.

Deconstructing Watchmen — Part 2, at VFXWorld.

Deconstructing Watchmen — Part 1, at VFXWorld.

NOTE: This title sequence was removed at the request of Warner Bros. I will never understand Hollywood’s approach to free publicity. Persistent souls will still find the titles elsewhere online.

yU+Co and director Zach Snyder teamed up to create this epic title sequence for the eagerly anticipated “The Watchmen”, which opened in theaters today.

The title sequence sets up the movie by traveling through several stylized time periods beginning in 1939 and ending in 1985. Vintage superheroes take stage as dynamic slow motion and selective movement empower each shot with beauty and intrigue.

From the yU+Co release:

The challenge for yU+co. was integrating titles into an already edited six-minute sequence that was built without the placement of titles in mind. In order to make the titles feel like an organic part of the sequence, Yu and his creative team wove meticulous detail into the type design. Rather then simply lay 2D type onto the foreground of the live action, it is incorporated in 3D into each scene.

According to Director Zach Snyder (via Fandango);

From the very beginning I wanted to do a cool title sequence for the movie and it was actually the thing that got me started drawing Watchmen because they were trying to figure out how much this movie was going to cost. I said it’s really impossible to say until I start drawing the movie and a get a sense of what the movie is…

So I literally went to the beginning of the movie and started drawing. It was funny because I had the music—I was pretty positive that it was going to be Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’.” Then it started to take shape for me as we really find out where we are in the world, and that’s how that sequence came about, tracing the alternate history.

The result is an imagined yet nostalgetic superhero landscape, setting up the film to be, hopefully, as inspired as the title sequence itself.

Posted on Motionographer

yU+Co: The Watchmen Titles

fxguide interviews Imageworks’ Pete Travers about Dr. Manhattan fx in Watchmen.