The Batman (2022) | Poster animation

Challenge & Process

To me, capturing the atmosphere of the poster was key. The grime, the smoke, the heavy rain, the insanely cool glowing bat-symbol.

First step was creating the batman silhouette. I created the cowl, the body, the cape, and the arms as separate elements. I started with animating the cape. I knew I wanted it to flow in the wind (For the nerds: Used turbulent displace to achieve this). I added a slight rotation to the arm in the shoulder joint too, so it moves a bit (I figured that Batman didn’t need a lot of movement, since the cape does the most of the work, but also because he’s a big, stoic, strong, intimidating dude).

This was all well and good, but with me going with a semi-realistic look (just like the actual poster), it just ended up looking a bit too flat for the style. So I added lighting to the different elements, but it still didn’t look right. I then found a picture of Batman, isolated it, made everything black (excluding the bright spots on his armor), and then I had Batman ready.

Then it was just nailing the color, the rain, the smoke, the bat-symbol on his chest, and finally adding the logo at the bottom. I’m really happy how it all came together.