Alice Fang – Looking Outwards – 5

HBO Westworld – Main Titles from Elastic on Vimeo.

Elastic is a company that produces advertisements, main titles for TV shows and movies, animations, broadcasts, and other video production. I really like this video, which is the main title they produced for the first season of HBO’s Westworld. (They also produced the main title for the second season as well. It’s on their website!) A team of CG artists, motion graphic artists, and designers, under creative director Patrick Clair, painstakingly built sets and models digitally. The programs they used include ZBrush, Cinema 4D, Maya, AfterEffects, and Octane. Through this, Elastic rendered and modelled 3-D assets that reflected the wild west, distorted human robotic symbiosis. Watching this in isolation always gives me the chills, especially with the music composed by Ramin Djawadi. The music and the scenes tie together to create an eery feeling, and I find the detail in the rendering to hit close to the uncanny valley (a point where realisim in androids makes a very unsettling affect).