The team at creative studio Imaginary Forces explain how they created the epic end title sequence for Guillermo del Toro's hit film Pacific Rim.
After the epic battle of humankind vs monsters in blockbuster movie Pacific Rim, action junkies were led into another treat with this main-on-end title sequence by creative studio Imaginary Forces.
Staff artist Ryan Summers explains: "Imaginary Forces had worked a lot with director Guillermo del Toro previously. He came with only a few guidelines as to what the sequence could be, primarily that it should focus on the Kaiju and Jaegers, and that it should be a counter to the final bombastic action of the final battle.
"Our pipeline used Cinema 4D to handle all the camera moves and rendering, After Effects to add background elements and text, and then finishing in our Flame suite. Cinema 4D's Physical Renderer was integral in our ability to deliver the project in a very short time. We came in quite late into post, and we created a rule that we wouldn't push anything through our render farm that took more than five minutes a frame.
The Imaginary Forces team used Cinema 4D and After Effects extensively to create the title sequence
"We had to insist on this rule because we had approximately four weeks to knock out the flat version, and then only two further weeks to complete the stereo version, which as a team we had never done before. We carved out two days early on in the process and took one of our Cinema 4D scenes that we used to create the initial pitch styleframes to dial in our render settings.
"We hammered out two render presets - one for final renders and one that allowed us to preview the lighting and composition in under 30 seconds. C4D's Progressive Render mode and Interactive Render Region gave us many more iterations than we thought would be possible."
This article originally appeared in 3D World issue 174.
