It’s no secret that I’m a film buff, and I especially adore the animated features (Hey, Pixar!! I’m looking at you) which are handcrafted and capture even a child’s imagination. Even Apple hasn’t remained immune to the animation culture in celebrating the 2018 holiday season. Anyway, if you love handcrafted characters from animated classics then “the Bird” wouldn’t have missed your eyes during movie times! This beautifully scripted and hand-painted intro appears before TV shows and movies such as Gladiator (2000) and in recent times Bladerunner 2049 (2016) and Earthquake Bird (2019).
It’s notably elegant for its unique style and use of subtle colours, but also the morphing technique incorporating the use of tailored canvas art with traditional cell animation artistry. No marks for guessing that I’m talking about the exuberant intro animation for the movie production house Scott Free Productions. This versatile production studio was co-founded by the legendary filmmaker, Ridley Scott and his brother, Tony Scott in the UK in 1995. But it wasn’t until 1998 that “The Bird” logo became synonymous with Scott Free’s productions.
This short 20-sec something intro — famously referred to as, “The Bird”, “Man Into Bird”, or “Shapeshifting Bird”, is also used in different abridged forms, was designed by Italian artist, animator, and illustrator, Gianluigi Toccafondo, as a series of individual paintings. The individual artwork pieces were then photographed and made into a single feature. It reminds me of the flipbook technique containing a series of individual drawings on single pages, and appear to move when the pages are flipped in quick succession. It’s the first view that a beginner in animation can expect to have to understand its nuanced semantics.
Try moving the right-hand slider as swiftly as you can progressing one image at a time, to get a feel of a flipbook. In short, that’s how this intro logo was conceived by the designer! It’s definitely creative.
On a black background, we see a man clad in monk-style clothing walking as a white light illuminates him. He lights up a match, and a burst of light appears next to him. We then cut to another shot of the man, as he runs away against a yellow spotlight. His arms transform into wings, and he turns into a bird that flies across a multicolored background. The text “SCOTT FREE”, in the same font as before, slide in underneath the bird before transforming into a weird font. The bird becomes a blue silhouette version, and the logo becomes still on a black background.
Scott Free Productions – Closinglogos.com
Going beyond the realm of the classic animation films by Disney-Pixar, some time ago, I had experimented with a flick about a boy who could communicate with ghosts called ParaNorman and was awe-inspired by its animation technique. Down the road, I watched the fantasy horror flick Coraline which involved an “adventurous girl finding an idealized parallel world behind a secret door in her new home”, and most recently I thoroughly admired the story and the action in The Boxtrolls which is about trash collecting trolls raising a boy. The art behind these movies called ‘3D stop-motion’ is about maintaining balance in the intricate movement of objects while filming each frame. Also referred to as ‘claymation’ since they use plasticine figures which are naturally flexible for sculpting movements. Not surprisingly, they have all been