“We wanted these abstract paintings to come to life — like when you go to a museum and you stare so long at a picture you see patterns in your head,” says graphic artist Richard Harrington. “But we didn’t want it to feel like it was made on a computer. And Motion allowed us to achieve this smooth organic movement with beautiful glows.”

Harrington used Motion to create a one-minute title sequence for “Soulmates,” a new film by director Joan Sugerman. Based on real-life events, the film tells the story of a man who radically redefines himself. The film was edited, mastered and finished in Final Cut Pro HD, and each time it rolls on screen, the first thing audiences see is the striking animated opening drawn from Sugerman’s ideas and realized by Harrington and his team using Motion.

“We wanted to locate the audience in a place outside the norm right from the beginning with these extraordinary visuals.”

The sophisticated title sequence started with a simple sketch. “Joan came to us with a vision of what she wanted and a rough, one-sheet storyboard,” recounts Harrington. “She handed us this piece of paper and said, ‘This is my title sequence.’ It was this very abstract, industrial-feeling collage. I turned it on its side, then upside down, trying to figure it out. The panels were all jumbled, with these flowing things that were somewhere between a lava lamp and organic moving cells.”

An Extraordinary Journey

Continues Harrington, “Then she explained what the film was about, and the storyboard began to make sense. It expressed the emotional journey of the characters in three distinct sections, starting with Eddie, whose life is hard and bleak, then moving into a crazy, passionate and confusing stage and resolving in this vibrant, engaging place when he tranforms himself.”

The director explains how she wanted the opening sequence to mirror the theme of the film. “The movie challenges people to think outside the box and come to a profound acceptance of human beings no matter how they look, act or relate,” reflects Sugerman. “That’s state-of-the-art thinking. So we wanted to locate the audience in a place outside the norm right from the beginning with these extraordinary visuals.”

Sugerman gave Harrington photos of works by three modern artists, each intended to inform one 20-second section of the title sequence. “The first is inspired by Victor Vasarely,” explains Sugerman. “It’s geometric, with no colour, to show the empty, confined, detached state of mind of the lead character at the outset of the film. The second draws on the work of Hans Hofmann, with jumbled, fast-moving colours depicting the chaos of the character’s transformation. And the third uses the diverse, vibrant colours of Frank Stella to illustrate where the character ends up — in this place that’s centered and whole.”

Born In Pieces, Coming Together

“After we analyzed the paintings, we watched Joan’s rough cut to see the images and colours she used for characters and moods throughout the film,” notes Harrington. The motion graphics artist quickly absorbed the director’s ideas. “We wanted the title sequence to show something exciting happening, something organic,” he explains. “You see a painting born in pieces then coming together as it’s assembled on the page.”

Harrington and his diverse team of fine arts majors, graphic designers and video editors started by creating sketches of abstract textures — some of them hand-drawn on paper, with brushes and paints, and others created on Wacom tablets. Once these were completed, they took digital photos and brought them into the computer. “So the sequence isn’t computer-generated,” Harrington explains. “It has the feel of a real artist’s work.”

Harrington then created moving collages from his team’s drawings: “We used Photoshop vector tools to overlap drawings with different shapes. Then we put each piece of the collage in a separate Photoshop layer. We were able to import all the layers cleanly into Motion. From there, it was really easy to animate the collages.” For the one-minute opening sequence, he notes, “we had 18 panels of static art, each of which is a scene in the storyboard and appears for about four seconds in the finished piece.”

No Ping-Pong

Harrington knew what he was after — and what to avoid. “We didn’t want it to look like these computer-drawn shapes playing Ping-Pong in space,” he says. “So we experimented with different effects.”

Motion proved to be a potent instrument for realizing their imagination: “It was our only motion graphics tool for this job, and it executed exactly what we wanted. When the job was finished, people said they couldn’t figure out how we did it. I mean, an experienced motion graphics artist could make some good guesses — it’s not that it was so earth-shattering — but the difference is that we harnessed the real organic nature of the behaviours in Motion, because it has this amazing ability to create natural movement.

“With Motion,” Harrington adds, “we were able to combine the best of traditional art with the power and speed of modern technology to achieve that fluid look.” For instance, he says, “Motion has these compositing and transfer modes that allow you to apply textures to your objects. So we were able to give the art that was done on the computer the texture of a real brush.”

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