WUT IT IS WILL BLOG YOU

We just finished working with Glen Murakami over at Cartoon Network on the title sequence for his hit show “BEN 10″, and its new season “Ultmiate Alien”. This show pretty much rules if you are a 10 year old, OR if you are a cartoon junkie like us, OR even if you are just into seeing a shit ton of cool aliens doing cool shit, or wutever.  WATCH IT peopoles! Premiere Friday, April 23 at 8p (e/p)! (DISCLAIMER: THIS GARBAGE PROMO BELOW ISN’T OUR WORK, BUT WATCH IT ANYWAY:)

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We have just delivered the Main Title and Package Design of “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno” premiering Monday Night, March 1st @ 11pm on NBC. With very little time to turn around a complete show package, Director Pete Conlon and Tech Director Brian Yarnell of WUT IT IS decided to go with a primarily live action piece that depended less on their fancy post techniques and more on in-camera-magic, the kind of magic that can only be captured by a really talented cinematographer. WUT IT IS teamed up once again with sister company MIRROR FILMS and called on Vasco Nunes (DIG!, ANVIL! The Story of Anvil, Planet B-Boy) to grind the cameras and lenses into dust. Pete Conlon wanted an imperfect, run and gun, hand made look to the footage. Vasco Nunes, using two Canon 7Ds, a variety of lenses and an endless knowledge of light and color, interpreted those directions perfectly and really captured the energy of Los Angeles and the City’s night life. The end result is a “real” Los Angeles and a “real” city at night vibe. Combine that energy with the prestige of “The Tonight Show”, and you get a unique and uncommon show package that stands out among the late night show crowd. WUT IT IS does it again….keeps it “real”, and all that.
Check back soon! We will be posting boards, a break down of the design process, and a directors cut to compare to the NBC Exec version.

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We just finished working with “The” Bruce Timm and some other awesome folks over at Warner Brothers Animation on a very kick ass TWO MINUTE MAIN TITLE SEQUENCE for “Justice League: Crisis On Two Earths”.  This feature film is a killer piece of work that we all enjoyed here at the WUT IT IS studio.  Boasting an All-star voice cast led by Mark Harmon (NCIS) as Superman, James Woods (Ghosts of Mississippi) as Owlman, Chris Noth (Sex and the City, Law & Order) as Lex Luthor, William Baldwin (Dirty Sexy Money) as Batman, Gina Torres (Serenity, Firefly) as Super Woman and Bruce Davison (X-Men) as the President. C2E is action packed, surprisingly violent (which is awesome of course) and kept us glued to the screen.  Run to the store and get yo self a copy NOW!

Here is a cool little MTV preview doc:

Warner Home Video

An original story from award-winning animation/comics writer Dwayne McDuffie (Justice League) rooted in DC Comics’ popular canon of “Crisis” stories.

Bruce Timm (Superman Doomsday, Green Lantern) is executive producer.
Lauren Montgomery (Wonder Woman, Green Lantern) and Sam Liu (Superman/Batman: Public Enemies) are co-directors.

Synopsis: In Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths, a “good” Lex Luthor arrives from an alternate universe to recruit the Justice League to help save his Earth from the Crime Syndicate, a gang of villainous characters with virtually identical super powers to the Justice League. What ensues is the ultimate battle of good versus evil in a war that threatens both planets and, through a diabolical plan launched by Owlman, puts the balance of all existence in peril.

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Back in June, we were super stoked to hear from our old director friend Liz Plonka. we worked with Liz on some cool Carlos Mencia stuff a while back, and knew it had to be a cool project if she was calling.  Sure ’nuff, it was pretty cool.  Jay Leno had just put Liz on board to direct  his new prime time show on NBC, and Liz in turn was looking for some proper graphics to package the show.  Liz had just seen our graphics for the new “Penn & Teller: Bullshit!’ season on Showtime,  remembered how easy it was working with us on Mencias special for comedy central , and thought “hey, lets give these guys a call”.

The pitch process was pretty long and grueling.  At first we submitted quite a few run of the mill “network safe” boards.  We threw the usual at them, city at night, lights, traffic, people running…you know, cuz you’ve seen it a million times.  Sometimes you need to pitch the obvious stuff first , get a reaction, then gauge where theirs heads are at from there.

We thought maybe it would be cool to have Jay at a diner at night, reading the latest headlines, just before going on stage.  So Cal diners and gear heads go arm in arm, so that set up was obvoius. The Jay crew thought so too.

We thought it might be fun to make a miniature model of the Hollywood hills and float a techno-crane-macro-lens kinda jammy setup over it…fun right!? Like the Star Wars Death Star trench scene, yeah? Again, too similar to what Conan might have.

We finally realized that  the Leno people were looking for something to really stand out from the other late night shows.  Duh.  We tried some more organic approaches, one which we thought had potential was this sorta hand drawn look.

Debbie, The EP had a bad experience with hand drawn looking grfx somewhere in her past dealings,  so we went one final direction, with photos from Jays past.  Boom, it was what felt right to them.  We did our best to keep it from feeling “too Jay” or “too sentimental”. The idea was to make it feel as though we optically printed all this loose footage back onto some old negative stock,  gate leaks and all.

The look worked well. The first pass was far more aged looking. Warmer colors gave it an aged feel that the jay folks wanted to stay away from.  Once we cooled it down with more chemical blues and greens,  it took on a lot more energy,  and everyone seemed to feel really good about it.  Another job delivered.

A great gig, and awesome people to work with.

Break a leg tonight Jay,

-p

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We got a call at the end of august from our new friend Elliot Phear in NYC.  Elliot’s agency Phear Creative does some cool branding work. Elliot needed 3 x 40 second spots for Yahoo Mobile Apps. “Nothing unusual” you say? Well, he needed them in an hand drawn animated style! “Ok, so what”, you ask? Ok, well, he need them turned around in 10 days!

Three 40 second HAND DRAWN and ANIMATED spots done in about a week?! “No schveat”, we say.” Let’s DO THIS.” I called my homie Joe Corrao and got him on board right away.

With Joey on board, our secret weapon short-stop Larry Hizo (“larry ho”, but it sounds better HIZ-o! in a high voice) and our usual suspects, we got to work. We had three apps to deal with: “Yahoo Finance”, “Yahoo Fantasy Football”, and “Yahoo Flickr”. Check out the spots and let us know what you think!

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This project was a ton of fun to design and produce. Brian and I had both seen Penn & Teller back in ’85 in a small Hells Kitchen “off, off, off Broadway” theater. In fact my “uncle” Art Wolf directed the show back then, before moving on to the Tracy Ullman show, et al. Needless to say, Brian and I got many free tickets to the show, and were both HUGE fans of Mofo the Psychic Gorilla way before this phone call came. I will be posting a more in depth “making of” in the near future, because the process we developed for this sort of low-budget-high-end-looking-green-screen-motion-tracked-looking-style is quite simple, and very cool. Check back soon.
-p

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We did this piece with our homey Marcus Raboy (he and i are still working on his site, but have a look anyway…he’s done it all) and our friends down in San Diego, Meads Durket. This project was nuts, with lots of post camera tracking (not fun at all) and a horse that just didn’t want to be on set. In an effort to calm him down, we got that poor horse so high that  the PETA girl was looking at us like “What you talking ’bout Willis”. No,JK, all was by the book I will be posting a “making of” on this one shortly. It’s too good not to.
-p

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We got a call from our pahtnahs (that’s partners pronounced the way Tu Pac would) Robert Nortnon (morty pie) and Jim Zigler (the Zig) a while back regarding some kinda Carlos Mencia Comedy Central Special thing-a-mah jig they was doing…ok it’s late, and i’m NOT gonna use proper english, so get over it. We went in and met with Mr Mencia, (or as we call him, Ned) Liz Plonka, The Zig and Morty Pie, and we got down to businezzz ( I use three z’s here cuz it’s crazzzy like that). Ned wanted something macho and crazy and high energy and something that would melt your face off if you looked straight at it. We werent sure we could deliver something that was overflowing with macho face melting energy, but we decided to give it a try…booyes

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Oh, ok..who DIDNT have a crush on Valerie Bertinelli when she was on “One Day at a Time”?! Don’t Lie. Anyway, this was your average lower third & end tag campaign kinda thing, but with Valerie Bertinelli! Yeah, exactly. Thanks to our peoplez down at Young and Rubicam for this gig. We can has cheeseburger.

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