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Posts Tagged ‘United States of Tara’

Animating on ‘United States of Tara’

Saturday, January 24th, 2009

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I met Jamie while working on ‘Coraline’ in Portland, OR so I was excited to get the chance to work with him again on the USofTara credit sequence. I was also very interested in testing out the features of his stop-motion software, Dragon.

When I arrived, Jamie had shot a test using a real pop-up book synced to temp music. We studied how real pop-up books moved when opened and wanted to translate this type of movement into the sequence. Many setups were actually built to move like a pop-up but some needed help, and others, well, we took liberties with the movement. We never strayed too far though.

Dragon was a joy to work with. I had previously tested the basic controls but on this job I was able to see what else it could do. Calculating camera moves for our manual rig, Multiple exposures while shooting, and utilizing the Cinematography window were just some of the benefits of working with this amazing program.

More on United States of Tara Titles

Wednesday, January 21st, 2009

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Here are a few more shots of our production plus a link to the Quicktime.


The opening shot shows a full house “Pop-up” in a larger than normal book. Morgan Hay went to work straight away on the house. It was our most complex pop-up. As the house settles Morgan used some cleverly placed rare-earth magnets to help make sure the house hit its end pose.

Anthony Scott animated the house scene using apple boxes and wooden wedges to hit each pose. The book had a notch in the middle so it would land on a rotation point. Anthony had to make sure he was heading toward that point during the opening of the book. Instead of moving the camera we decided to move the set on rollers toward camera.

We used one of my favorite Dragon Stop Motion cinematography tricks on this shot. We shot two exposures per frame. Anthony would capture the first frame with the fill light on and the second with the fill blocked with a flag. In After Effects we just put both shots in the same comp where we could vary the level of the fill during the shot. We could shape the fill with masks and key frame the amount of fill light over time.

Alex Juhasz painted so many motor cycles for the “Buck” sequence. Sometimes we decided to shift angles and Alex would be back to work. He was a real trouper.

The final shots with the shed were made with multiple light passes – again this is a great way to have CGI style control of the lights in post with stop-mo.

Click here to view the title sequence.

United States of Tara Title Sequence

Friday, January 16th, 2009

Tara Set

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During the last couple months I have been working on a the title sequence for the new Showtime series “United States of Tara”. The show stars Toni Collette and was written by Diablo Cody. The idea of the show came from executive producer Steven Spielberg.

The Tara team wanted to have a paper pop-up style opening credits. We worked closely with Tara writer Dave Finkle on the boards and overall concept.

We had a top notch crew working around the clock which included the amazing illustrator Alex Juhazs, the unstoppable stop-motion animator Anthony Scott and the die hard Morgan Hay running the art department and kicking everyone’s ass to get it done. The job was produced through Duck Studios (L.A.) and shot in my satellite studio in Ojai CA.

We shot primarily with the Canon 40D and an iMac running Dragon Stop Motion 1.1. We also used a Nikon D300 and a Mac Pro so we could work in tandem.

We shot everything stop motion and built many working pop-up pages to show the different personalities that Tara shifts into during the first season.

I will be back to post more about these titles after they’re broadcast next week.