Their renewed collaboration led Neveldine and Taylor to seek White’s guidance in crafting a new opening title sequence that would set up the franchise’s back story in more detail for unfamiliar viewers while also establishing the film’s edgy, rambunctious tone.  At this point, White immediately brought Visual Creatures into the mix.

 

Working from voiceover penned by the film’s writers, White cut together some preliminary storyboards by McNeely and Cranston to screen for test audiences.  Once the sequence scored extremely high, Columbia engaged Therapy and Visual Creatures to create the fully-realized sequence, resulting in an eye-popping, impressionistic blend of live action from the film’s originally-intended opening along with animation and graphics that evoke the story’s comic book origins.

 

Crafting the opening sequence posed some unique creative challenges for the team at VisualCreatures in designing 2D animation with 3D methodology.  Notes Cranston the Creative Director on the project, “We created all of our characters in 3D and achieved a 2D look in our shading process.  Some of the pieces were separated and cut out to be dealt with in 3D post conversion and some we worked with in our own compositing programs.”  The team at VisualCreatures utilized a combination of Maya and Cinema 4D to animate the characters and build the environments and utilized 3rd party plug ins like Turbulance FD and Particular to create fire and weather elements that felt less realistic and more painterly. The Studio crafted the sequence in comic book style with a more artful and organic approach to align with Brian Taylor’s darker perspective on the characters and film as a whole. VisualCreatures took some of their inspirations from Japanimation as well as older more rudimentary forms of animation but attempted to recreate these styles in high-end 3D software to inject a modern twist on the classic Marvel characters."