Jim Read: Evil Tease
For many moviegoers, a great trailer can make the difference between “must-see” and “maybe.” It’s a massive challenge to win over a jaded, captive audience with just a few minutes of visuals, audio, and text. But in the right creative hands, a trailer can become the most powerful persuader in any film studio’s marketing arsenal.
That’s where Jim Read comes in. Read is Creative Director of 1741 Films, a motion graphics and design firm specializing in film trailers and teasers. As a division of Trailer Park, a major producer of entertainment industry marketing services, 1741 Films is involved in some of Hollywood’s biggest film projects.
“Almost everyone at 1741 does a combination of design and production,” Read says. “The majority of our work is motion graphics and animation for feature film advertising. We also do title sequences, commercial TV spot work, broadcast design, and traditional logos and branding. Between Trailer Park and our outside clients, we get to work on a wide variety of projects — from TV spots for Pixar’s Ratatouille to graphics for the annual CMT Music Awards. As for films, we’ve recently done stuff for Gone, Baby, Gone, I Am Legend, Rush Hour 3 — the list goes on and on.”
Resident Evil: In-House Effects
A successful movie trailer can become art in its own right — it’s an ultra-compact film about a film. Case in point: the first theatrical teaser for Resident Evil: Extinction, which 1741 Films was instrumental in developing.
The entire process took about a year, Read says. “We started by storyboarding a teaser concept, working with our Trailer Park producer and the clients at Sony and Screen Gems Marketing. That went on for quite a while. Then the marketing department shared the boards with the feature production team and CG company, and they executed the CG we had designed.”
Meanwhile, 1741’s designers and producers began developing ideas for the main title and interstitial text elements, using the film’s arid, post-apocalyptic setting as a motif. “This installment in the Resident Evil series takes place in the desert, and the marketing team really wanted to play up that location,” Read notes. “So we experimented with designs based on sand: words emerging from sand, sand blowing apart, and solid forms disintegrating into sand.”
In the finished teaser, the main title surfaces from a swirl of sand and coalesces into super-sharp, crisp text — an effect the client requested for both aesthetic and practical reasons. “It needs to work in all these different media,” Read observes. “Not only are we thinking about how this will look in 2K format and on film, but also downconverted to standard definition on a TV screen, or compressed for the web. In its smallest size, people still have to be able to read it. So ultimately, it resolves pretty sharp to make sure that everything is legible, no matter what medium it lands in.”
The 1741 staff’s up-to-the-minute technical expertise was essential to the project. “We did all the production in After Effects and Maya on the Mac,” says Read. “We have a couple of amazing in-house 3D guys, and they used Maya for all the sand and particle animation. They created flow maps so the sand would move around and mound in a certain way, then used displacement maps to push it up. Ultimately we did a lot of compositing and beauty work in After Effects — there were six or seven layers generated from Maya, all composited in After Effects.”
Once the CG elements came back from the main studio (including images of a desolate Las Vegas and shots zooming into and out from space), Trailer Park’s editorial staff worked with stills from 1741’s boards to create an animatic. Visual effect shots trickled in as the overall teaser came together. “We continued to develop motion tests of sand-forming animations for a while, then shot it off to film and shipped it,” says Read.
A Lean Machine
Given the complexity and detail of these storyboarding and motion graphics tasks, it’s impressive that Read’s core team on the Resident Evil project was just five people. “Our combination of design and production skills enables us to work very efficiently,” he explains. “Our art directors are used to working with After Effects on the Mac and can give very specific direction on projects, so we don’t waste a whole lot of time in production.”
Tight time constraints and technical challenges define every aspect of the studio’s workflow. “The budgets have all stayed the same, but the turnarounds have gotten faster,” Read remarks. “And we’re doing an increasing amount of work in HD and 2K. Most of our 2K production work is at 2048 x 1556, 24 frames per second. Technically, that’s Super 35 full-aperture, which allows us the most flexibility in delivering scope, flat, HD, and doing SD downconverts and center extractions.”
Working this way takes a lot more computer firepower, and 1741’s technical staff must constantly upgrade its systems to keep up with these demands. Carefully monitoring and maintaining the server pipeline also reduces potential problems.
“We have a fantastic system,” Read says. “All our media sits on an Xserve RAID, fully populated with the biggest drives available. And it’s RAID 50, so we get speed, safety, and reliability. We’ve also added some other gear, like HD monitors and Blackmagic DeckLink cards, to help with the transition from standard definition to a more HD and 2K world.”
Staying up-to-date with software is equally important, though Read and his team proceed with caution when updating to new versions. They’re currently trying out the latest beta version of Adobe After Effects, but they’ll wait for the final release before installing the update studio-wide.
