Rambo

Lately I seem to be doing plenty of grunge-style graphics, the most recent of which is the promo graphics for Rambo. If you’ve seen the film or even the trailer you’ll know that it’s ultra-violent; and it would have been easy to do something blood-soaked but I decided on a more subtle approach. The online trailers for the film feature different styles, one where the graphics have a polished metal-look and another with a stone-look. The stone has a nice gritty feel and to me the polished look didn’t suit the subject matter. As with many of my previous projects I built the background using a number of different stock images of dirty walls, cracks etc. and combined that with key art from the film. I particularly like the cracked concrete, which I felt was indicative of the fractured emotions of the Rambo character. Rather than placing all the background layers into a single comp, I made them 3D and distributed each in z-space so that when the camera pans to the right you see a nice parallax effect. The text was created and animated using Zaxwerks ProAnimator with a stone texture applied to the front face (Mikey our Maya guy whipped that up for me). I used Curves to move the blacks towards a deep red color. The blood behind the text is a duplicate of the text with Roughen Edges (using the Color Rust setting) and Turbulent Displace applied. The Turbulent Displace creates a nice smearing effect. Finally the light moving across the background is a simple animated Fractal Noise layer blended with the background using the Color Dodge mode.  Watch movie