Marvel Studios
Main on End (MOE)
CG (Computer Graphics)
VFX/Visual Effects
Kinetic Type
3D Modeling
Animation
Finishing
Stereoscopic

Ant-Man

Our Ant-Man title sequence  is imagined in a wire-frame universe of red-gold objects spun with fiber-optic threads. Starting with an outer-space vision of our globe, each scene clicks tighter into the earth’s atmosphere. We swoop with the camera past satellites, airplanes, and birds, to street and city grids, foliage and grass, penetrating to an ants-eye view and swirling micro-universe.

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The Inspiration

Marvel Studios’ Ant-Man is the tale of cat-burglar-cum-hero Scott Lang, whose super-suit gives him the power to shrink to ant size and gain exponential strength.

With ants in the title of the film, it’s natural to assume the main-on-end solution might be full of…well, ants. But we dove deeper than that. What makes Ant-Man truly special is his morph from hapless Everyman to scale-shifting superhero: His shrink to tiny makes him a giant of a man. That scale-shifting transformation anchored our titles.

Exploring, we generated lots of scale-jumping ideas to create something exciting and unique to the Marvel universe. The “Powers of 10” concepts Ray and Charles Eames featured in their documentary shorts were a great inspiration. Their films expanded out from the Earth to survey the entire universe and reduced inward to microscopic spores, even showing the Pym Particle suspended in a red liquid. Seeing that led us to research fiber optics, and how they would look in a world steeped in red. But much differently than the Eames’ objectives, our goal was to create a distinct look to further tie our visuals together, showing that at every scale increment, everything is connected.

The Movement And Technique

Our MOE sequence of 16 glowing scenes does that. Each is imagined in a wireframe universe of red-gold objects spun with fiber-optic threads over a dark background. Starting with an outer-space vision of our globe, each scene clicks tighter into the earth’s atmosphere. We swoop with the camera past satellites, airplanes, and birds, to street and city grids, foliage and grass, penetrating to an ants-eye view and swirling micro-universe.

Heightening the magic of each scene, pulses of light timed with musical cues from the soundtrack move through the fiber-optic threads as they wrap and twirl, adding vibrant energy to each bird, microbe and particle.

Merging these views with typography posed challenges.  Each name was legally required to appear for a specific (and varied) amount of time, difficult, given the swirling, fine-lines of the art design and Marvel’s stereoscopic 3D imagery requirement.

The solution from our lead motion designer Duarte Elvas, was to suspend names and titles in type boxes that matched the fiber-optic thread motif.

We used Cinema 4D as the primary production tool for the MOE, Nuke for compositing and Smoke for finishing. Finished, the sequence shows off not only our design and animation talents, but also our deep visual effects (VFX) capabilities.

Project Credits 
  • Executive Creative Director
    Erin Sarofsky
  • Executive Producer
    Steven Anderson
  • Producer
    Erik Crary
  • Visual Effects Supervisor
    Matthew Crnich
  • Editor
    Andrew Manne
  • Animation Lead
    John Filipkowski
  • Motin Designers
    Duarte Elvas
  • Brent Austin
  • Chris Anderson
  • Patrick Coleman
  • Chris Beers
  • Nick Hopkins
  • Alex Kline
  • Anthony Morrelle
  • Tnaya Witmer
  • Andre Zazzera
  • Smoke and Finishing Artist
    Cory Davis
  • Music By
    Christophe Beck
Client Credits 

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