Openings with Similarities to mine

After getting feedback on my animatic after the crit, a few people pointed out parts of my animation that reminded them of other older openings, so I decided to check them out to see how they went about animating and show casing characters - and making sure that I didn't unintentionally rip any one off!



I think that the main similarity here is the close up of a hand holding a gun. This is held up for a lot longer than in my animation, and the above sequence also doesn't have the gun shooting - it is like a warning rather than an excuse to show action, showing a theme of the show without being too dramatic. There is also some use of silhouettes towards the end of a woman dancing against a coloured background which is something I thought of initially for my animation before deciding that with multiple silhouettes, keeping the background as a consistent black would be a much better idea.




The Cowboy Bebop opening sequence also uses characters highlighted in different bright colours, again as a key to show personalities and differentiate them between each other. It makes the opening much more interesting, and I do think that it would have been good if I found this opening before I started storyboarding, and there is a lot more going on with the silhouettes and colouring and that would have been very fun to explore in my own opening. Next time I think that I will show my initial ideas and storyboards to people before an animatic so that I can find these similar animations much sooner and study them then.



The Mission Impossible Opening begins with a match being lit and the line of it burning (much like on cartoon bombs, with the fuse burning creating suspense before it explodes) reminded people of the character with the gun in my animation, when he shoots and the camera follows the movement of the laser. Having it continue on over other parts of the animation could have been an interesting idea, but I like how that part of my animatic worked out, with the white of the gun expanding to set the background for the next part of the animation.

I will definitely try to get feedback earlier next time, and have other peoples' ideas influence my storyboards/animatics as well as my own. These are some openings that I never thought to look into, even though they would have worked really well as inspiration for what I did.