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Unit 10 James Bond Project

Research and Development

For this unit I will be creating a James bond type title sequence, and because of the amount of various sources we have to use as examples, there are many different ideas, scenes, and special effects to choose from. So I will now begin my research on the different James bond openings, and the kind of elements they incorporate into their movies and start to create some ideas.

 

 

I have watched various James bond title sequences and looked at the kind of features included in most of them and some of the things that seem repetitive are things like shadows, silhouettes, and effects similar to earth elements like fire, water, rivers, explosions, and guns etc.

 

In this Bond movie "Die another day" you can see the examples of using elements like fire ice water and explosions to show the intensity of the film. Things like the insects on the floor are the kind of factors I should be changing into my own thing and instead have something like a gun or lipstick etc. I have also noticed most of the James bond title sequences they all have a large sexual factor to them with the various silhouettes of women dancing and moving about in symmetry, and I think that is an important thing to remember, as it is repetitive in most of the films openings.

 

This next James Bond film "Casino Royale" is another good reference to use as this one is based more around the action and fighting and theme they were trying to use, there was many fight scenes in this one once again using the effects of silhouettes and this time they used they effect of his enemies breaking into little pieces as a cool effect. Also I really like how they laid out the theme for the opening, which was all about cards as they had it as the background design and used things like the king and the design of the card suits really well. 

 

 

 

The last opening ill be looking at is "Goldeneye" because it sums up all the different factors that have been used throughout all these James Bond openings as it uses the silhouettes and sexual factors a lot and very well, the theme for this one compared to the other two which were the cards, fighting and the insects etc. However the theme for this one seems to kind of tell the story of the film which is communist Russia as you can tell from the special effects of the guns, sickles, stars, flags, and statues. You can also see how important the music is as it links very well to the pace of the opening and also the name of it, so I will have to be very careful when picking my soundtrack. 

 

Mood Board

I have now completed my mood board, from it I have portrayed my various ideas for my title sequence it will be based around bond being captured by a very powerful Chinese military group and it is based around him struggling to survive and escape the prison they put him in. The main villain being an evil Chinese general with a grudge against bond, that is the main background for my story. I want to include elements of traditional Chinese colours and weapons, so I researched pictures of Chinese colour pallets, dragons, weapons and pattern designs as this is what I would like to have going on in the background of my video. In terms of my special effects and the things I want happening in the video I have researched images of various silhouettes, fire, weapons, explosions, fighting, women, and different perspective shots that I can include in my video, as these things are the main elements I have picked out that seem to be reoccurring in all the James bond openings, so it is imperative to me that I can include all these things in my title sequence to really capture the essence of the James bond movies. 

Music

For my music I have selected 3 different songs of a somewhat different genre instrumental, rock and alternative rock. I have chosen these 3 songs because of their really jumpy beats and how they link on really well with the type of opening I am trying to create, as I need something slow but upbeat. However I can only pick one so I have decided to pick "The Rolling Stones- Gimme Shelter" from all my 3 options this is definitely the best as for one the lyrics really relate to the elements of James bond, really upbeat and the song moves forward at a good pace and it just fits perfectly with the kind of video I want to create. 

Name

For the name of my title sequence I wanted to relate it to the story of my video, so I made a few name ideas trying to relate to escaping and a hard struggle in the end I could only come up with three names which are: the pathfinder escapist till dawn, and the dynasty retreat. After thinking about it I didnt really like the pathfinder as I thought it just wasnt powerful enough as a name, but the other two I liked a lot however I thought that the dynasty reteat felt a lot more interesting and influencial so I am going to stick with the name "The dynasty retreat".  

Storyboard

The first scene will be based off of the classic james bond opening.

The seccond scene I want to be of a girl/woman smoking. 

This scene will be a zoom shot of my main antagonist

This will be a shot of bond being taken through a prison.

This will be a scene of women, woman dancing.

A scene where bond is being interrogated by the guards.

The first figh scene in the prison

Another scene of girls dancing.

A shot of bond lethally executing someone

A scene of bond fighting to escape the prison

A wide shot of bond escaping the prison

Last scene is bond casually walking away from the explosion of the prison.

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I started my projecct by researching some tips and tutorials for green screening and color correction then begun with a zoom shot of one of my antagonists looking towards the camera, and experimented with the keylight function for the green screening and using various background clips like smoke, fire, and tri- tone to test different varieties of colors that I could use. 

After learning to green screen I have started modelling a star in maya, so that I can try to import it into after effects as an animation to get more of a feel for the theme of it. After succesfully getting it to work I lastly started to try using silhouettes with one of my clips, and now that I know the basics of the after effects functions I will start making the other scenes from my storyboard, and making the current scenes better.

Firstly I started by finishing the scene in which bond gets knocked out, by adding a backround video of a forest then changing the contrast to make it darker. Due to the fact that I didnt really like how the stars looked in my video, I decided to change it up a bit by modelling some other objects that I could add into the scene to create a different animation. So I began to model a chineese katana, and 32 caliber bullets to give more of an action feel to my movie. After modelling all the objects I made a simple animation of them falling, then batch rendered it and brought it into after effects, then it was just a case of duplicating the animations and changing each of thier speeds so that they would fall simultaneously and I really like how it turned out.

After finishing my forest scene I decided to start on my prison scene in which bond is taken hostage to a secure prison, so I started on maya by creating a simple design of the outer gates of a prison, then on the inside I made another model to be the main building of the prison, after texturing it all I rendered a standard image of it with light then brought it into after effects. After keylighting the clip of bond being taken hostage I added in the image of a prison along with a background image of a dry wasteland to look as if its in an unknown location, I then croped out the sky and added a moving video of clouds, to give it a good realistic look to it. And lastly to make it look perfect i duplicated the image of the prison, fliped it and changed the tri tone so that it would look like a shadow, I am now going to move on to the interrigation and fighting scenes. 

For the interrigation and fight scenes I used the same techniques for all 3 scenes as I was running out of time but still wanted them to look good. So I started by keylighting the green screen and masking out the edges, afterthat I found 3 different images of cool dark rooms with light, to really give the movie a bit of a dark and fearful look to it, after adding in the images I would use tri tone to change the contrast of the characters as the clothes they were wearing were not suitible enough, lastly I put them all together and started on my last fight scene for the prison.

For my last fight scene I had to learn how to create realistic gunfire as this was my favorite fight scene, after watching a short tutorial I started by grabbing a section of fractal noise, for the shape and look of the gunfire then after I changed the contrast and tritone to give it a kind of orange color. After it was just a matter of feathering the sides and fiddling more with the contrast to get the perfect look for it, I then adeed it to my clip where I moved it to the position of the gun and changed the size of it to last about a frame. And lastly I added in a moving abstract background to represent his freedom from the prison, now that this is done I am going to move on to the final scene.

For my final scene I thought it would be cool to make a kind of shattering effect in my scene also so that I could link it straight into the final title sequence. So to do this I begun by finding another dark background with light in it I then took it to photoshop where I cropped out a picture of a chinese dragon and pasted it onto the wall of the room, so that I could get a better feel of the origin of my ideas about the chinese military being the main enemy. I then brought the image into after effects and used it as my background, after I created a new composition then added the clip and the background, I also freeze framed the clip at the exact point where I wanted the shatter to start then saved it as an image, so that the character and the scene would also be shattering. Next I added the shatter effect to this image and changed the viewport so that it would shatter the image not the background, after that it was just a simple task of keyframing the depth and bringing it back so that after the shatter has been done all the peices will fall to the ground. Lastly I just added a black solid underneath the images and added the text and faded out, this now completes my james bond movie. I would have liked to fix a few things for example I wanted to add gravity to the model of my star and weapons so that it would look more realistic, also some of the clips when I added tritone to create silhouettes looked a little pixilated or see through, and I would have liked to fix that, however I did not have enough time, regardless I am still very happy with the outcome and think it looks great.

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