Garson Yu, founder of yU+co., on creating the title sequence for Paul Weitz's circus vampire film

In Paul Weitz’s latest film, Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant, adapted from Darren Shan’s popular young adult novel series, two teenage boys must regain control of   their fate amidst a chaotic world of warring vampires and sideshow freaks, all while the ring-leader of this circus, the menacing Mr. Tiny played by Michael Cerveris, attempts to cruelly manipulate them. yU+co.’s title sequence for Cirque du Freak instantly introduces the audience to basic plot elements, representing the two boys as puppets wandering around cemeteries and other sinister settings-literally controlled by Mr. Tiny, who holds the strings. Animated in the style of simple woodcuts and shadow puppets against a whirling organic backdrop, the sequence efficiently sets up the film, while entertaining as an innovative piece of animation in its own right.

In our Q+A, Garson Yu, creative director and founder of yU+co., discusses the natural origin of the shadow puppet concept, getting the hang of animating puppet movements and using Maya to tie-in the movie’s themes.

Watch the title sequence here.

How did you work out the idea for the sequence?
The idea came from the discussions from my first meeting with Paul Weitz. We had created a temp title, which is a short title review, about seven seconds long. He used that for the preview and after that he asked us to work with him on the entire sequence. I was then invited to watch the film in the cutting room.

He said he really wanted to show the teenage boys who are the two main characters being puppets and the evil character Mr. Tiny as the puppeteer. So I pitched a shadow puppet idea-we would create the boys as a shadow puppets controlled by Mr. Tiny.

Paul wanted to introduce six of the freak show characters from the film in the title sequence. He provided some artwork from the art department for the design of each of the characters. We took those drawings and adapted them into woodcuts. The whole film had a design element that referenced German expressionist woodcut artwork. So we created the rest of the environment based on the look the film had already laid out.

What was your workflow for creating the piece?
He [Weitz] gave us a music tentpole. Basically, we have six different animators-they are a team-responsible for each of the vignettes, one for each of the six characters. We took the storyboard frames and blocked off all the action and timing. Then we divided the work among the animators and put it together with the tentpole from the film editor. Once we had that together, we sent animatics to the composer so the composer could start working on the music. Then we continued finessing our cut, adjusting our cut to the music.

You said you based your animations on puppets. Did you do any actual puppetry to capture those movements?
We looked at actual shadow puppets and did tests on how the objects would look close to the screen. Then we would create softness at the edges of the puppets’ silhouettes. We also checked out shadow puppets on YouTube. But ultimately we came up with our own interpretation rather than mimic something else. We used Maya 3D to figure out their movements.

You did capture a sense of realism…
Realism was very important. The puppet is hung by strings so because of gravity, there is a weight of each piece of the puppet that is pulling the string. We wanted to make sure the puppet itself has a sense of gravity. Then when the string pulls up, each part of the body swings naturally suspended. It’s important to communicate the idea of control from the puppeteer to the puppets. I think the piece is based on control so we stuck with that idea for the entire sequence. Sometimes we had an animation that was cool and looked great, but if it didn’t work with that overall theme-conveying a sense of control-then we would drop it.

I especially like how your titles fit in with the rest of the animation.
We saw the credits as objects, which also had a sense of gravity. They are hanging by the strings…objects like the coffins carried by the puppet.

Yes, the credits are like actors on a stage. They interact with the boy puppets who carry the titles through the forest and later use them as a staircase to walk up on.

The patterns in the background play an interesting contrast to the puppets. How did you come up with that?
Those references came from our library that we shot for other projects and we used them to give a little bit of life to the background. On each section of the vignette, the background changes according to the story. It has this mixture of an organic abstract that’s a moving, living background while the foreground is this hard-edged kind of graphic.