The Boy
The Boy, a new feature from Chiller Films and an Official Selection of SXSW 2015, played in select theaters nation-wide. Co-produced by Elijah Wood, this thriller centers on a nine-year-old boy slowly losing his sanity as he lives an isolated existence at the Mountain Vista Motel, run by his father, John (David Morse). The movie is about a little boy developing in a budding interest in cold-blooded murder. The Boy also stars Rainn Wilson (The Office). This was a fun one to design/animate for, horror is hard to get wrong.
Credits
- Client: NBCUniversal | ChillerTV
- Creative Director: Shea Pepper
- Project Manager: Meghan Dineen
- Art Direction: Bobby Ushiro
- Designer/ Animator: Bobby Ushiro
The general idea was for the logo to act as a Mortisse into the Boy’s decent into a psychopath. This transition would be revealed through the fire-burning the innocence of the boy and hint at the growing essence of this sociopathy through the animation – the red and orange schizoid colors taking over.
Sponsor page – tertiary elements another deliverable for ChillerTV’s needs.
This was style-framed in After Effects, it allowed me to swiftly jump into the animation and further composite of the show package once the direction was approved. I experimented with different methods of achieving a realistic burn render through Cinema4D to be comped into After Effects.
I tried various techniques to get the fire burn to look right, from Turbulence FD to rendering it through a condensate pane of glass. I found that TurbulenceFD had a tough time simulating small-scale burns and fires. In the end I relied on some compositing tricks to give the show package for The Boy to feel as realistically demonically scorched as possible.
INITIAL STYLEFRAMES
