The Last Movie Stars is a 6 hour documentary for HBO Max, executive produced by Martin Scorsese, about the extraordinary love, and lives of Old Hollywood’s most enduring couple, Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward.
We were tasked by director Ethan Hawke to create timeless, organic titles and visual devices to serve as a framework to display an almost overwhelming amount of archival material. The result was a series of analog inspired design & animation intended to make the audience’s experience feel organic, and contemporaneous with the era of Paul and Joanne’s lives we were portraying. Continue down for case study.
Offical Trailer
MOTION DESIGN CASE STUDY
Photo Albums
Using a myriad of practical elements from old paper, letters, and photo corners, to scotch tape, spiral binding, and even glue stains, we created an infinite ‘classic’ photo album design to display the Newman family photos. Variations on this were based on the variety of content they held, and who was supposed to have made them. They also served as a framework for titles.
Tape Players
As the story goes, Paul Newman and his partner Stewart Stern recorded hours of interviews on audio cassette as a reference for his memoirs, interviewing friends, family, and many colleagues from his elite inner circle. These interviews were unedited, and the interviewees, unrestrained. One day, seemingly at random (no one knows why), Paul took the tapes to the dump, poured gasoline on them, and lit them on fire.
Thankfully, Stewart had the interviews transcribed. Director Ethan Hawke brought on an incredible cast of actors to read the transcripts as voice over for The Last Movie Stars.
Our task was to create a series of 3D animations to represent these lost tapes playing in tape decks. Our approach was ‘stylized hyperrealism’ - realistic lighting and textures, pushed slightly beyond reality in favor of beauty with regard to color, reflections, depth of field, and other organic elements, such as film grain.
Software: Cinema 4D, rendered with Redshift. Comped in After Effects.
Slide Projectors
The Newman family had a massive collection of slides as well as photographs. Rolling with that, we created a simulated slide projector as a framework for some sequences where the images shown didn’t make sense in a photo album. It also added an intimate, voyeuristic visual device with a darker tone than the rest - handy when you need it!
Comped in After Effects.
Slide Sheets
Certain sections of the show called for something different. There are certain categories of stills that simply don’t make sense in a slide projector or a family photo album (e.g., publicity photos, behind the scenes photos). To address this, we created an infinite field of slides, held together in a plastic sheet, and placed on a light table. We could populate this design device with a large number of stills, and, where motivated by the story, create sweeping camera moves.
Comped in After Effects.
Newspapers and Magazines
…make up a large amount of the archival for this project, as Paul and Joanne were one of the most documented couples in history.
For the newspapers, we created a uniform look that pushed the texture and ink color slightly beyond reality, so that while remaining nice to look at, the newspapers could be seen and felt… almost smelled!
On the magazines we added some age and paper damage to enhance realism, and then gave them sort of a ‘showcase’ by lighting them with a spotlight - a subtle push toward making them feel as if they were on display at an exhibit.
Closing Credits
Our task was to come up with an organic and beautiful way to present the closing credits. Director Ethan Hawke wanted to use this opportunity to showcase photos that would act as a sneak peek at the films featured in the following episode. Some photos featured Paul’s work, some Joanne’s, and most were of them individually.
We built on framework of what we’d already established, and created a design showcasing slides laid out on a light table (the fluorescent lights of which flicker on if you watch closely!).
In this example (the final episode), our take was to showcase only photos of Paul and Joanne together, as way to put a punctuation on the end of a long journey, and subtly reward the audience with a final taste of this couple’s enduring love.