"Red Dawn" Process

This project was for my motion class, it was a group project where we all picked a classic movie and animated a famous scene. The movie I chose was Red Dawn.

To start the project, I first watched the movie and picked out scenes that stood out the most to me. This was a mood board I created to help me choose a scene that I liked, as well as present it to my group to get their opinions.

I drew up some thumbnails and created some color palettes to help decide on the scene I wanted to recreate.

I settled on the scene where Robert (C. Thomas Howell) yells “wolverines”, a classic scene that would be easily recognizable. I took a screenshot from the film to use as a reference:

The next step in the process was creating a storyboard to illustrate what I wanted to happen in my clip of the project. The scene could only last 5 seconds, so I chose my elements of motion to be the paratroopers falling in the background and the text appearing.

Once all of the motion was figured out, I began to paint digitally in Procreate (my favorite way to create digital art). This was the slowest part of the process since I like to spend a lot of time doing realistic rendering. Here was one of the process photos, I worked in small areas to build up the painting. I start by dropping in colors and then smudge them together.

I then added noise to the finished painting to give it an older/aged feel to match the movie.

Once the painting was done, I drew the paratroopers in seperate layers so that I could take it into Adobe AfterEffects to start animating. To achieve the motion, I used the position keyframes for the paratroopers and the scale keyframes for the text. I then added in sound to the project, I took the sound right from the scene of the movie and synced it up with the text that appeared.

Here's the finished project: