Design work I wish I'd done

PCW: How did the idea for the sequence come about? said:

--[they're] like blobby, amorphous shapes, but as you zoom in you see that the small details are the same shape as the objects that they came from. So you can keep continuing infinitely into the details, and they keep growing into the bigger shape that you saw before.
The concept was something he'd been thinking about for years, and with this film he finally had a chance to put it into practice. He's the one who came up with the concept and the look of the shot.

PCW: Was that something that was in the script, or was it sort of added after the fact?
Carras: It was something Neil added to the shooting script. It basically says, "Camera drops down into New York street, and through a series of fractal zooms, we see X, Y, and Z." He wanted a visual-effects overture to the film, and he knew the title sequence was the place to do it.
Seeing a descriptive line like that in a script is absolutely the fun part of our job. Starting out on the conversation of how it's going to be realized visually is a tremendous thrill, because that's the creative essence of the work we do: taking words on a page and making them into something an audience can watch. Hopefully, they've never seen something like that before.

PCW: Do you want to just dive right in and tell the story of how the sequence was created?
Josh Comen: I think if you only use one technique to accomplish a sequence like this, the audience is going to get it, because the audience is always more tuned in than one assumes they are.
Carras: Here's the big secret. Everything you see in that infinite zoom in that scene through New York was shot on completely stationary cameras.
The way it was shot is that there was a rig of three Red cameras mounted side by side on a single tripod, and each one had a different lens on it ... a wide-angle section of the street, a medium, and a close-up. All at the same time, [they're recording] the same movement from the extras walking around in the frame and the cars traveling down the street. And because it's New York, you've also got the lights and the billboards blinking on and off. Just tons and tons of motion in the frame. So it's important to capture all that video with three lenses at once so you have all that information.
They did the three-camera setup at every block and intersection in several parts of town. The title sequence opens on 8th Avenue, then it goes through Harlem, and through Times Square.

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lefty said:

Really? Those are carved? Pretty cool.

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lefty said:

^Crazy.

I'm Comic Sans, Asshole.


lefty

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