Dark and Edgy
Henry’s original idea had involved bold typography with a contrasting colour palette, cutting between black and white to suggest the fairy tale’s opposing forces of good and evil. However, Rupert later chose an edgy, dark look comprising imagery the audience recognises from the film and, in particular, the shards of obsidian the dark knights shatter into, to confound and defeat the soldiers in the final battle sequence. “The titles held a magnifying glass to those details and played with them in a visually exciting way,” said Henry.

The Mill’s team handled concepts and design, a high-speed shoot with a Phantom camera capturing the required costumes and props, digital modelling and compositing of the various elements. The finished sequence was a combination of live-action, specially shot footage, elements from the film itself for the backgrounds, and a very stylized CG animation of the shattering effect. They also created a custom font for the project.

Extreme High-Speed
They chose an extreme high-speed camera for the shoot because it would help them explore the textures and micro details of the knights' armour in detail, as well as the ‘explosions’ of the dark knights in action. “We used the Phantom Flex, recording between 200fps and 600, generally sticking to around 300,” said Henry. “Despite the high speed feel we actually sped a lot of our shots up to around 150fps.It took enormous amounts of storage – I think we ended up using nearly 5TB of data in the one-day shoot.”

Because they had so many shots to get through on the day, the DP Jim Matolsz had tested a simple lighting set up beforehand that allowed them to keep a static lighting arrangement while moving the scenes in and out of the set up.

“The raven was nearly the last shot of the day and the creature practically lit itself. The glistening plumage responded really well to the edge lighting and simple approach. Even so, filming the raven was the trickiest element of the shoot. When shooting Phantom you only get the tiniest of moments to get the action you need, so working with an animal to get the performance you're after in a split second takes a lot of patience and ingenuity. The results were worth the effort because the texture we got on the bird's wings from the camera are fantastic,” Henry said.

Shattered
“From a visual effects standpoint, our greatest challenge was to create a high speed macro shot of the ‘shattering’ of the dark knights. While the VFX team working on the film would have taken months to develop this effect in their shots, the title design team had to effectively work out how to mimic their original effect with a macro level of detail - in a much shorter length of time.

“Rupert Sanders had tested the shattering practically earlier on, trying materials such as black wax and stone, but the explosions caused a lot of dust and in the high speed moment it was difficult to see the beauty of what was happening. So when we came to produce them ourselves, 3D modelling and dynamics artist Ed Quirk and the creative director Andrew Proctor set up a simulation of the tests in Softimage and began methodically testing and working out which finish would best suit the dark lighting from our camera shoot.” Other software used in the project’s pipeline was Nuke and After Effects.

The team needed to create striking, cinema-quality images that frame and focus on the principle titles. Images and text had to harmonise well enough to simultaneously captivate the viewer’s eyes and guide them through the titles content. In Henry’s view, this image-to-text integration is why the titles work so well.

Custom Font
Creative Director Manija Emran developed the customized typeface. He wanted to give it a classic look to match the setting, but also make it sharp and contemporary enough for modern audiences, and named the new font Ravenna after the Evil Queen. It was created in tandem with the rest of the project, so they used a proxy font initially for placement and lighting. Justin Sucara, working on 2D type animation and finishing, built a transition that could be applied to the final font once it was ready using the proxy, which sped up the timeline.

Henry said, “Usually a font with this level of detail would take months but unfortunately, as we only had a couple of weeks, a parallel timeline seemed to be the best way to work. The font was developed from an existing typeface, before being broken down and rebuilt. Layers and multiple stages of flourishes and details were then constructed by Typeface Designer Manija Emran. Each letterform had a range of custom glyphs that allowed each name in the sequence to have its own personality.”

The Mill’s Executive Producer in LA, Stephen Venning, said these titles sequences represent a ‘statement of intent for design at The Mill’. "While The Mill is known for high-end VFX, 'Snow White and the Huntsman' marks a first for the team in designing, directing and creating a major movie title sequence from start to finish. This is an exciting new direction for our company," he said. www.themill.com