Anymotion 2019 Opening Title

Since the event is all about motion graphics, we decided that the motion designers had to be the central element of the story. Many ideas were discussed but we chose to portray them as heroes, fighting against a world of stillness in an anime-inspired opening title of a fake series called Anymotion.

It was important for us that the people watching felt that there was more to be discovered. In order to achieve this, we used a few cliches common in animes that we found during our research about the narrative style. A few of them were: “group photo with one character being late”, “characters running”, “walking to the horizon” and “characters eating”.

Another detail that helped a ton the characters come to life was giving them names. They became real characters with their own personalities, instead of being just “the 3D character” or “the VFX guy”. Since the event happens every year in São Paulo, Brazil, we also added a lot of references of the city in different scenes of the video.

After understanding our characters, their personalities and the world they were living, we started to storyboard our vision for the story. During this process, we noticed how important music would be for this specific project. Since it didn’t just support the animation but had its own importance to the general aesthetic of the animation, it was essential that we changed our usual process to accommodate this necessity.

The second biggest challenge of this project was the creation of the fight scene. We had never storyboarded something as complex as this in terms of the choreography of movements, especially with the time restriction we had due to the number of scenes and the length of this section of the music.

To make it even harder – and better – we challenged ourselves to make this fight more dramatic by going into a completely different style than the rest of the video.