Case Studies
Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (Th1ng )
Bloody, eerie, intriguing, or, as th1ng’s creative director Richard Morrison puts it: “itchy yet grand”. No matter what you call it; fact is that the title sequence to Tim Burton’s screen adaptation of Stephen Sondheim’s musical thriller Sweeney Todd drags the viewer right into the gloomy London of the 19th century, where the murderous barber had his little Fleet Street garret room.
A glimpse through Sweeney’s attic window shows his iconic barber chair, standing almost threateningly in the ghastly moonlight. Thick blood drips from its armrests, and the viewer is invited to follow its tracks down through cracks and chinks in the floorboard, onto the mechanism of Mrs. Lovett’s mincing machine, right into the meat mixture of “unknown origin”. An appetizing but simultaneously stomach-turning shot of oven-fresh mince pies amongst pools of boiling blood then takes over, leading the viewer to the final sequence of blood leaking from the oven into the London sewer tunnels, down into the open sea.
The main notion throughout the entire sequence was that of blood: plastic, paint-like, thick…a notorious theme of blood trickling down through the darkness of Sweeney’s industrial London, executed in a burtonesque style which formed one of the major creative concepts in the sequence and was initiated a long time ago by Richard Morrison’s first sequence for Burton’s Batman film. This introduction of a dreadful visual journey full of darkness and saturated colors paints a vivid picture of an industrial Victorian London – as anyone would have imagined it without having seen the movie.
The creepy Sweeney Todd intro sequence obviously didn’t grow on a tree overnight. An army of CG specialists and compositers with a core of eight experts worked on it for over three months. The team, led by creative director Richard Morrison who worked directly with Tim Burton, enjoyed a great amount of creative and artistic autonomy. “We had plenty of freedom,” says Morrison confidently. “I met with Tim for a few drinks, discussed the movie, looked through some parts of the script, and then he just let me come up with anything really. He only asked for certain film characteristics to be in the sequence, such as the mince pies. So I read the script and then I completely stopped thinking about it for a while – just to clear my mind, you know... And then after some time, all of a sudden – as if, I started picturing the whole idea in my head."
Morrison, who has worked previously on other film titles including The Constant Gardener and The Golden Compass, had no trouble getting inspiration for his intro to Sweeney Todd. “I normally meet a director, listen and experience them. I then try to figure out what they are like and try to understand what it is that they want me to do,” he says. “With Tim, it was a lot about experience and my previous collaboration with him. Tim’s movies are very characteristic and so the title sequence had to be truly special. In fact, just watching this specific title sequence you could probably easily tell which director this was for.”
With so much blood and fluid movements to visualize, the th1ng team decided to go for a combination of filmed and computer generated fluids. And what’s better than to use an Academy Award-winning fluid simulator on the title sequence for an Academy Award-winning film? So RealFlow it was.
Indeed, RealFlow came in very handy… Shay Hamias, design director at th1ng explains: “We tried to film as much of the fluid sims as we could, but it turned out that controlling fluid movement was very challenging and difficult. It requires a lot of patience to end up with a perfect effect and we had to use some sticky liquids to slow down the dripping movements. At times we just had to create or enhance things using software,” he adds.
The th1ng team decided to use RealFlow because it stood out from other software packages in terms of quality and usability. “On one hand we had a great idea, on the other we had to put it into action somehow,” says Hamias. “We have tried many different means of employing what we wanted and RealFlow appeared to be best in certain parts. The software is very good at achieving very complex stuff.”
And complex stuff was what th1ng was aiming for. The blood in the sequence looks especially thick, almost paint-like, sticky, plastic, and moves in a great variety of ways from Sweeney’s high-up garret room down all the way into the dirty London sewers. “This, we felt, was very close to the movie itself,” says Richard Morrison. “When you think about the blood in the movie, it was almost comical and very thick. We wanted to introduce this type of mood right from the very beginning.”
Another clear challenge, especially from the creative point of view, was to achieve consistency throughout the sequence, at all levels. Because th1ng was shooting a set of pieces at intervals which then had to be assembled as if in a puzzle, working it all out on the computer was crucial.
The combination of an award-winning team of professionals and an award-winning fluid simulation package definitely did the trick. Confirming they are very pleased with the final results, Morrison and Hamias say: “It has to be said that this piece of software allows creating truly incredible animations. We are pretty sure we would be using it in our future productions.”
About th1ng
th1ng (thing one) is a leading animation and mixed media production company based in London, creating commercials, idents and title sequences for film and TV.
The studio was founded by Dominic Buttimore in 2004 and became home to a host of well-known and talented animators, producers and creatives.
With its well equipped facilities to edit, composite and grade, th1ng’s team uses live action, animation, graphics and special effects – mixing them up to produce the best creative result. For more information, please visit www.th1ng.com.
Credits:
Client: Tim Burton/Dream Works and Warner Bros Pictures
Creative Director: Richard Morrison
Art Director: Shay Hamias
Director of Typography: Dean Wares
Executive Producer: Dominic Buttimore
Editor: Dan Lumb
CGI: Graham Christie, Vernon Victory, Jamshed Soori, Matt Redhead
Production Manager: Mark Farrington
Compositing: Peque Varela, Peter Ardiner, Corinne Ladeinde
Production Company: Th1ng
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