Marvel Studios’ Ant-Man is the tale of cat-burglar-cum-hero Scott Lang, whose super-suit gives him the power to shrink to ant size and gain exponential strength.

With ants in the title of the film, it’s natural to assume the main-on-end solution might be full of…well, ants. But we dove deeper than that. What makes Ant-Man truly special is his morph from hapless Everyman to scale-shifting superhero: His shrink to tiny makes him a giant of a man. That scale-shifting transformation anchored our titles.

Exploring, we generated lots of scale-jumping ideas to create something exciting and unique to the Marvel universe. The “Powers of 10” concepts Ray and Charles Eames featured in their documentary shorts were a great inspiration. Their films expanded out from the Earth to survey the entire universe and reduced inward to microscopic spores, even showing the Pym Particle suspended in a red liquid. Seeing that led us to research fiber optics, and how they would look in a world steeped in red. But much differently than the Eames’ objectives, our goal was to create a distinct look to further tie our visuals together, showing that at every scale increment, everything is connected.

Our MOE sequence of 16 glowing scenes does that. Each is imagined in a wireframe universe of red-gold objects spun with fiber-optic threads over a dark background. Starting with an outer-space vision of our globe, each scene clicks tighter into the earth’s atmosphere. We swoop with the camera past satellites, airplanes, and birds, to street and city grids, foliage and grass, penetrating to an ants-eye view and swirling micro-universe.

Heightening the magic of each scene, pulses of light timed with musical cues from the soundtrack move through the fiber-optic threads as they wrap and twirl, adding vibrant energy to each bird, microbe and particle.

Merging these views with typography posed challenges.  Each name was legally required to appear for a specific (and varied) amount of time, difficult, given the swirling, fine-lines of the art design and Marvel’s stereoscopic 3D imagery requirement.

The solution from our lead motion designer Duarte Elvas, was to suspend names and titles in type boxes that matched the fiber-optic thread motif.

We used Cinema 4D as the primary production tool for the MOE, Nuke for compositing and Smoke for finishing. Finished, the sequence shows off not only our design and animation talents, but also our deep visual effects (VFX) capabilities.