Twenty Three Title Sequence
Ah, this is a little late, but I thought I would post it anyways. This is the final title sequence for a short film called “twenty three.”
“Twenty three” was the grad project for one of the VFS writing students. The writing student’s scripts were produced by the VFS film department and we were given the task of developing title sequences for one. Myself and Asuka picked “twenty three” out of the bunch and developed concepts for it.
(I apologize about the choppiness of the video. I’m not sure why it is so choppy and am looking into how to clean it up some)
The film itself is about a boyfriend / girlfriend that are about to meet the lady’s parents and talking about some of their fears in meeting them. All in all, it is a rather funny little film with a bit of an indie feel to it. To adequately capture the feeling of the film, we struggled greatly with concepts. Eventually we settled on the idea of a roadtrip as one of the lines from the film indicates that the couple just drove half-way across the country. From there, the idea of using a map was pretty straightforward. The execution, however, took a lot more effort. Building the entire setup in Cinema 4d. The pen and camera moves took a while to work out properly (and as I remember, I lost the file partway through and had to redo them). However, the real kicker was in the rendering.
In order to achieve the motion on the pen ink as well as the other additional elements (the drawn-on heart, coffee stain, crumbs and sun), I needed to access them directly in After Effects. Since the methodology of export from Cinema 4D is flattened image sequences, I needed to attach an object buffer onto each element I wanted to animate and render it in particular. That rendering generally took around 3 - 6 hours per object. I also had to repeat the rendering of a number of objects repeatedly due to problems or mistakes. All in all, I believe this project had somewhere near 3 to 4 days worth of rendering put into it (that’s hour-wise). I wasted a lot of time and learned a lot about the best way to work in Cinema 4D, so that was really good, but it was awfully frustrating. Extremely frustrating. However, finally, finally, all the rendering was done and then I had to face the spectre of rotoscoping all of these individual layers in After Effects. That itself took a significant amount of time, but I’m rather happy with how it came out finally. At last, I exported out of After Effects with a few additional effects added to heighten the quality of the work.
Finally came the audio. As a student of VFS, we have access to an online database of music from a company called 5 Alarm Music. I generally like to produce my own music for these sorts of projects, but for this one, I didn’t have much time available to me and I was looking for a very particular sound to the music. Searching around, I found the one you hear in the background; a nice piece of “traveling” music. At last, I added in some sound effects to reflect the car and traveling nature of the title sequence and produced the final piece seen above!
In terms of things I feel could be improved, I was never particularly happy with the shadows of the crumbs as they fell. At first, the shadows are all squares, which didn’t make sense to me, but I didn’t have much time to fix it and I had already gotten the timing right. Also, I had a lot of trouble with rotoscoping the pen ink to the pen itself; an issue that thinking ahead would have solved somewhat. The main stroke of the pen especially was difficult to match up and I eventually just re-rendered a part because I didn’t want to do rotoscoping for it (and it would have looked bad anyways). Also, I feel that the coffee stain could have been better, but I wasn’t sure what to do and ran out of time. Finally, I wish I could have added more texture to the map itself. I feel like it is a bit clean for the piece and the film itself, so a little more texture and “dirt” would give a better feel.
I think my proudest moment on the project was figuring out how to do the pen stroke. Originally I had a lot of trouble conceiving how it would be best to make that stroke and be able to animate it at the same time. Then, I was hit by a stroke of genius! Taking a screen shot of a top-down view out of cinema 4d, I made the stroke in Illustrator, exported it into Cinema 4D and applied a extrube NURB to it so that it would be a solid. From there, I attached the object buffer to it (to create an alpha channel) and rendered it out to bring into after effects. In after effects, I applied the alpha channel to the clean render to be left with just the stroke! Then I can apply a mask or whatever to the footage and all the camera angles will be kept perfect. I liked the technique so much I applied it to three other objects in the piece. That one solution made my day on this project. It was wonderful.
However, all in all, I’m rather pleased with how the project turned out. It was great and I had a lot of fun figuring out how to work between three different programs to bring the whole concept together. I hope you liked it too!
