Foxtrot X-Ray Celebrates 25 Years of Phoenix Film Festival!
Foxtrot X-Ray is once again proud to be a partner of the Phoenix Film Festival, returning for a 5th consecutive year to conceptualize and produce the fanfare animation that opens all 270+ screenings at the festival. With this being the "silver anniversary" 25th year of PFF, we created a sequence inspired by the metallic Marvel Studios logo featuring projected images of past Best Picture winners, the festival's many creative poster designs, and of course the logos of the fest's generous sponsors. With a heroic original score by award-winning composer Christopher Caliendo, animation by our CG Supervisor Seth Wise, editing by Calum Merry, image prep by Gabe Vigil, and compositing and creative direction by Paul DeNigris.
The Process
First, Paul described the overall vision to the team, with the added parameter that the sequence should be 60 seconds (give or take) in order to accommodate all the required sponsor logos. Then while Seth was modeling the embossed logo in Cinema4D (working from PFF’s provided vector art), Christopher created a first pass of the music using MIDI samples. Phoenix Film Festival staff gave us access to their archive of poster art from 2001 to 2025, as well as images from every Best Picture winner since 2001, which Gabe then prepared for animation while Seth began composing and rendering camera movements over the embossed logo. Calum took these preliminary “animatic” renders into DaVinci Resolve along with the MIDI music track, and cut together the first sequence.
A frame from the animatic
A frame from the animatic
Iterating
Several iterations of this animatic were created, as Paul gave notes on pacing and camera movement which resulted in Seth making revisions and rendering new material for Calum to integrate into the edit. Christopher continued to edit the music as well, providing several MIDI versions before locking it down to be recorded by live musicians. Meanwhile, Paul animated simple sequences of film stills sliding past camera and posters flipping from one to the next with energetic transitions. These would all ultimately be projected onto Seth’s geometry in the final composites. Once the animatic was locked, Seth exported full-resolution metallic renders of the logo with multiple passes for use in the Nuke composites.
Render passes
Multiple passes combined and adjusted in Nuke
Compositing
The final steps involved importing Seth’s 3D model into Nuke and setting up multiple projectors (sometimes dozens) to project the poster and movie still sequences onto the metallic surfaces. Calum assisted with this portion of the process, helping Paul to lay out where projections would appear. Paul then went shot by shot to adjust positioning, timing, logo placement, and legibility of elements. Paul also added an animated sequence of light streaks (in PFF black and yellow) to the “floor” of the space - an homage to Marvel’s use of the "Bifrost” from the Thor movies as the floor of their logo treatment. Finally with the addition of glows, diffusion, lens artifacts, and motion blur - and Christopher Caliendo’s full, impactful score that echoes many heroic themes from Hollywood’s past - the sequence all comes together in a glorious celebration of our favorite film festival.
The Nuke projection setup
A frame from the final animation
