With more than 500 movie theatre rooms, Cinemark is the largest Brazilian film exhibition company. So, Hey Hey Hey, the security film I did in 2014, was surely the most viewed film in Brazil along this season. The film is projected in every single session, which means that at least more than 40 million people will have seen it, by the end of one year of screening.
For a long time, Brazilian Cinemark has produced its motion graphic films with the CG-3D technique. One of the problems with it, is that these films go along with feature blockbusters from Hollywood, whose leading CG-3D technology, I would say, is impossible to compete with, in terms of what Brazil can produce. In other words, BR Cinemark audience unavoidably will have the perception that the motion graphics have lower quality than the features they precede
So, my advice to my client, on the production of our films, was to go for more creative and original solutions, with mixed styles and techniques, in addition to more artistically abstract visuals, rather than the fake-realism and the sometimes uncanny valley experience of the traditional CG-3D. Besides that, after many years always offering the same style, it was time to renovate and to offer something different to the public. With that in mind, I and my team produced the four films you can watch here.
The FLIX experience was done mixing the silhouette of a contemporary dancer, dancing together with some solid tridimensional shapes, with flat colors, made as abstractions of the F-L-I-X letters themselves. The interaction of such elements together was developed as the choreography of an imaginary Action-Adventure movie.
Left: Photographer André D´Elia watches Vivi Medina´s make-up been retouched by Makeup artist, Isa Spironelli.
Center: Film editor Mauro Moreira checks up live action mate with animation design.
Right: The remarkable Colombian contemporary dancer, Vivi Medina, dancing on its marks.
To synchronize the dancer, in slow motion, with the music beat, we played a record of the beat, alone and accelerated, to shoot the live action. Then we edited both animation and live action together with the right beat, and Fabio Goes, the musician, did the final arrangements based in the final composed image.
To be successful along all the process, I used the old bar sheet method, from the story board and live action shooting, to the final edition and score finalization.
Flix Bar-Sheet with action timing and music notation
To commemorate the BR Cinemark fifteen years anniversary, I suggested butterflies. This was because they can be identified with Brazilian nature, as well as with the light of movie projectors, which brings life, magic and movement, through the air. The butterflies’ wings were done with hand-made crayon texture, to look more abstract, instead of realistic images. I hand-drew every single frame of the main butterfly movement, to be further copied by the CG animator Fernando Fracaroli. I did it as a straight-ahead animation, with a very loose flow, so as to avoid the usual mechanical fly of most of the CG butterflies already done.
Fifteen Years´ butterfly design
With the Five Hundred Theaters and the Hey Hey Hey film, we went for hand-drawn animation, and with flat, but very impacting colors and contrast. For all the BR Cinemark films, we used flat black or white backgrounds, which gave a very good spatial feeling, when projected on the big screen.
The Five Hundred Theaters motion graphic is based of representation of the movies´ genres: Action, Adventure, Fantasy, Sci-fi, Musical, Comedy, Thriller, etc. But, again, I did it more as abstract representations of the genres, than usual standard clichés.
HEY HEY HEY, 1 minute: A pile of 35 centimeters of pure hand-drawn animation
For Hey Hey Hey we mixed the flat colors with real crayon textures. The colors menu was inspired by the work of Bauhaus artist, Johannes Itten. To explore the idea of film diversity, I created more than 30 very different characters, with distinguished design and animation timing, representing the nowadays most popular feature themes, as Heroic or Space-fantasy and Super-heroes. I worked with ten assistants and two more animators, besides myself. Gil Caserta did the backgrounds on flat colors stylized CG-3D, in order for Flavio Castello to work on my AE composition, which as then turned into a Stereoscopic film. The result, on the big screens is really quite successful and effective to communicate its security instructions message, clearly and joyfully. Fabio Goes, again did the score and I have no other comment about it than: -Hear it!
Céu D´Ellia
Hey Hey Hey´ size comparison chart