Film Festival: 'Brazil'

Assistant visual FX artist Ben Pokorny of The Colonie was recently awarded top honors at AICE Chicago’s Camp Kuleshov ‘Design’ competition for ‘Brazil,’ his graphics-driven title sequence for director Terry Gilliam’s dystopian fantasy.
The guidelines for the contest were to select a film from a list of ten titles and, using only footage from the movie, and original graphics that they designed, create an intro title sequence that fits its feel and style.
"I hadn’t seen ‘Brazil’ before so I decided to give it a watch,” says Pokorny. “I loved the style of the film; I loved the style of the technology, and thought it would be incredibly fun to adapt that to a title sequence. My main goal was to the keep the feel of the hectic automated world depicted in the film while integrating the credits into the mix of malfunctioning technology and paperwork.”

Pokorny took footage from the movie and modified it, using both Adobe Photoshop and Adobe After Effect to create a series of work order forms titled ‘Department of Information.’ The documents matched the look and style of the forms used in the film, with the addition of a film credit on the ‘name’ line of each one. The sequence of paperwork with the movie’s credits flows seamlessly into a scene from the film that opens with a similar looking business form being put on a clipboard by a worker and stamped.

A graduate of Columbia College, Chicago where he studied computer animation, Ben Pokorny joined The Colonie as an assistant editor in 2012. He made the move to his current position as assistant to visual FX artist, Tom Dernulc, early this year, building on his training and bringing an editor’s eye to his new role. His recent work includes a spot for Nintendo Super Smash Bros. 3DS for Leo Burnett.