MGM/UA Home Video

It's that time of year again. A highly-anticipated remake gets released and suddenly everyone wants a piece of that pie.

Well, I do too... and also two-others. Maybe more on the way. I don't know.

Rollercoaster scene

The “critical point” was animating the camera on the first scene as it goes down the filmstrip rollercoaster. It did take a while for TVS and co to figure that out. So that's what I did first, to just get the hard part out of the way.

This first attempt of mine is... not very optimal. What I usually do when I find moving the camera to be too hard is to flip the tables and have everything else move around the camera. In this case, it works, up to a certain point.

Midway through I ended up having to move the camera anyway because that empty is getting wayy too hard to control thanks to its anchor point being all the way at the edge. So the first part doesn't look too bad, but then its… yeah.

Aside from the camera, the curve itself is also a bit tricky to get right, especially around the U-turn where the handles are especially a pain:

The bends on it are very tight for whatever reason

— ordinaryboss

For the filmstrip itself, I opted to use an actual model and just slap some modifiers on it, because it seems easier to edit. This same basic filmstrip model is used for both scenes, although they aren't identical.

There's an **Add Camera Rig** extension that adds a couple of more options to the add camera menu.

The “dolly rig” is one of them, and it's packed with drivers and stuff. Point being, it's easier to control than whatever hack that mess was.

Well, it looks better now, but it's using linear interpolation. The pain only starts when I change them all to bezier and start smoothing it out, because oh boy. There's a lot of things that become misaligned and wonky in unpredictable ways, and that's where the real battle lies.

I did learn not to parent the aim to the camera itself though, or else this happens:

I still believe that it's actually more trouble than it's worth to try and replicate everything shot-by-shot if the frames in-between end up going absolutely everywhere. It's like trying to fit a curve where technically the important points match, but it doesn't at all look like the real thing.

So my focus when I do this kind of stuff is instead how smooth the camera is, not necessarily the percentage of similarity when you overlay the original thing with the remake. Oftentimes, getting the feel that it's as smooth as the original is enough.

Anyway, here's what I ended up with after a bit of fiddling. Not too bad. Although at this stage the camera movement is still rough especially when it lunges forward into the filmstrip, something that I would eventually fix.

Like others' attempts, the light rays were an actual 3D model built into the filmstrip.

The MGM logo reveal

Filmstrip

Some others prefer to use a single texture to provide the filmstrip look with the model itself being a simple subsurfed plane. Understandable, as even in my setup, with the points it has to render and the fact there's a video texture on it, everything gets kind of laggy. Look at that sub-20 FPS on that preview.

Camera movement

There's two parts that move here: the camera and the model itself.

The model itself is moved first to—again—kind of match the source material with easier control. You might notice that empty in the video (even if it's kind of hard to see). Everything is parented to it so that the whole model moves together.
Then the camera is used to help make it pop up from the bottom of the screen. In the original, the model sort of "pops", as if being viewed from a wide angle. I lowered the focal length to replicate this.

Shine

What I ended up doing is:

Duplicate the model
Delete everything except the vertices that make up the sprocket holes
Extrude them upwards, creating the shine
Skew them a bit using shape keys as needed

I could have again used geometry nodes for this, but I just didn't feel like it.

So that's for the ribbon. As for the mask and reef, they too have a similar shine, except there is a bit of a pattern that I tried to replicate: my interpretation was that the edges alternate between light and dark.

The first thing I tried was somehow assigning materials from within the Edit Mode. That didn't work, as materials are assigned to faces. It's at this time that now I remembered that geometry nodes existed, and so I can just use the edges individual indices to assign the materials: odd ones get the brighter material, even ones get the darker one. Maybe I got that backwards. I'll have to check (and post the image on here too)

As the mask and reef looked tiny in the way I angled the camera, to get it to look like the source material I cheated a bit here by animating its overall scale—of course, parenting both the mask and reef to another empty to make it easier.

Mask and reef

Speaking of, I'll briefly go over how these are modeled. I did reference the prototype versions of the logo as the details in these parts are clearer, and there is footage in them of these parts by themselves.

The reef is a bunch of curves with a mirror modifier applied.

I can Shrink/Fatten the vertices to control their individual size, although I find it a bit hard to control how exactly one vertex transitions to the other. Seems to be a straight line. The best I could do is control the handle size of the vertices, which seems to approximate the kind of tapering that is used.
The mask is two parts: a regular mesh with mirror and subsurf applied to it; and some closed curves with only a bevel on them.

Some other models I've seen apply so much detail to it that, even in HD, is not really that noticeable. Yet some others also try to make the mask a single mesh so as not to deal with so many objects.

For the final (golden) mask object I duplicated the mask created here and adjusted the mesh a bit to cover the area under the eyes.

Leo footage

I already had some Leo footage on hand, which is perfectly fine since it blends in Leo with his body extended from the MGM Television logo. But it still feels a bit too blurry for some reason. So I tried to make another one from a good enough rip of the 2008 logo. It does introduce some holes at the bottom but I figured it's still worth a try.

Final logo formup

Short points here, I might detail some more later.

The particles aren't too hard, the object used is a bright white circle and placed in its own layer, so the sparkles are added in using compositing. As to how it forms up, I just used the build modifier. It's a bit tricky however trying to adjust the build order. And because I'm lazy, I'm also using the mirror modifier because the whole thing is symmetric anyway. Although it is a little less precise.
Since the filmstrips on the MGM and the MGM/UA parts look a bit different, I extended the flash to cover the entire thing instead of just the center part and mask. I should note that in the source material the filmstrips on both parts are almost identical, one of the things missing in the MGM/UA one is the white shiny parts near the mask and reef. But mine differs a bit more than that, including some of the curvature.
There's two ways to paint the filmstrips. One is to paint the textures, the other is painting "with light". I chose the latter. :p
Geometry nodes are used for the "MGM/UA" text spinning in, it should make editing this specific part easier.
The final shine particles are applied on a huge plane covering the whole screen, and the masking was done in compositing. That way you don't need to adjust anything else.