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Sarofsky Corp. Completes Main Titles for ‘Captain America: The Winter Soldier’

Led by president and owner Erin Sarofsky, Chicago-based creative studio completes work on the main-on-end titles for Marvel’s ‘Captain America: The Winter Soldier.’

In conjunction with the film’s Blu-ray release, Chicago-based creative studio Sarofsky Corp. announced that it has completed work on the main-on-end titles for Marvel’s Captain America: The Winter Soldier.

Led by president and owner Erin Sarofsky, the company also designed the main titles for Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy, which recently surpassed the Captain America sequel as the top grossing film of 2014.

“We are striving to be a creative powerhouse on a global level,” Sarofsky says. “What's great about these projects from a business standpoint is that they have elevated our visibility. They've given us the type of notoriety that's hard to achieve over a whole career...let alone over our five-year run. So now, looking forward, I'm excited to see how we continue to evolve.”

"With this film, [directors] Anthony and Joe [Russo] produced a narrative that evokes 1970s conspiracy thriller cinema,” Sarofsky says. “With that in mind, we wanted to create a main-on-end title sequence that acknowledged their inspiration but was interpreted with more modern sensibilities. So we worked within a visual style that has simple, graphic compositions with strong, legible typography. This look is a clear nod to the spy style and political thriller title design of the 60s and 70s.”

Before work could begin, the Sarofsky team had to rapidly adopt some major infrastructure and on-site security upgrades. Beyond adding security cameras, key-fobbing the finishing suite and server room, and adding a second enterprise-class server with segregated workstations, they also installed a new Autodesk Smoke system to enable real-time monitoring of their 4K stereoscopic files.

The artistic vision of the winning treatment put Erin and her colleagues in familiar territory, creating stylish, thoughtful animation that heightens viewers' experiences in watching feature content. However, the challenge of delivering both in 2D and stereo 3D was a new one for their operation, as was the ability to view the 4K stereo files for internal reviews.

As a result, the team relied on RV from Tweak Software for playback, which handled the stereo files flawlessly. They also used Autodesk Smoke for conforming and playback to a 4K 3D television monitor. That toolset worked great with their existing pipeline, which was designed around Adobe After Effects, The Foundry's Nuke, Maxon's Cinema 4D, and Softimage.

“As a designer in the main title arena, working on Marvel movies is as big as it gets,” Sarofsky comments. “Having the opportunity to work at this level is where we all hope our careers will take us. As a business owner, I'm really proud to have been able to provide this opportunity to each of the talented artists and producers that worked on this project, and I'm excited to see how their careers are impacted by it in the long run.”

Source: Sarofsky Corp.

Jennifer Wolfe's picture

Formerly Editor-in-Chief of Animation World Network, Jennifer Wolfe has worked in the Media & Entertainment industry as a writer and PR professional since 2003.