WUT IT IS WILL BLOG YOU

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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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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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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 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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