Having finished with the showreel, I now need to apply all of those skills and some of the new techniques to main project: my title sequence. I started back at the beginning, looking over the brief and my own plans for the Captain Sunbeam film, and re-reading my tutor feedback.
Building assets is a logical starting point for any vector-based animation, however, I'm unsure if this is the right method for my particular design: I fully understand the practice of it for importing shapes from Illustrator into After Effects, but so many of my assets are based on typical geometric shapes that I feel I may be better off creating them in After Effects. I feel a benefit of using Illustrator imports is that I still struggle to make paths out of the shapes that are made in AE, so at least this will provide me with the option to play with vectors and lines when I want my shapes to express and exaggerate their movements. Regardless, it's very helpful for planning out the finer details such as transitions and finalising text choices.
For the names and production company titles, I wanted to reflect the culture that I want this film to represent. Having taken design inspiration from Dr No and Cool Runnings, it felt only fair to look at their casts and characters. Following this, I chose Jamaican actors from the past 60 years and a reference to the Jamaican islands themselves.
With my text-choices nailed down, I then had to adapt some initial concepts to lettering that suited - so the B that formed the hills in this concept board is now an M, which I will round more to make sure it looks more like a hill in the distance before rotating to reveal the character name.
It's a small annoyance that Gas Bucey has a shorter first and longer last name than Marguerite LeWars, as I really liked the red sun coming into this top corner.
But it will be easier to have my E turn into this belt-buckle pattern. Currently the yellow background slides into place along with the pattern, but I feel like having the sun rise in an arc will be a better look (arc's being an principle of animation) and I might borrow from my pendulum screen wipe to have the yellow background come in with it.
I'm not sure how I'll do it, but having the rays of the sun break of into a wiggling line of strokes seems like a cool idea. The name will also have to appear around the O, a problem with not current solution, but once it does I think a strong, sharp zoom will be a nice transition to Charles Hyatt's name inside one of the strokes.
Thankfully I started my animation lessons with a rolling square, as I was in a very "title sequence" frame of mind back then, so I was able to take that exact animation and bring it back to fulfil its destiny as the opener for this video. I'm fairly happy with the general look of the animation here, timings leave a lot to be desired and I need to change the text (the 'presents' phrase will fit better before the 'a...film' phrase). I think I'll save the specifics of timing for when I've chosen music (work that's going on in the background currently), and I'd like to give the focus-objects a little more character (especially the starting square and the text).
Again, I'm happy with the general look of this, the idea of a road is clearly portrayed, and the idea of hills is certainly suggested. I think I'll definitely have to simplify the curves of the hills as they look a bit drippy and a man-made. I'm going to play around with having them morph back into the proper M shape as they turn, but I'll see how they look once they're proper hills.
The E joining looks quite smooth (there's a small cover over the left of the entering object that disappears along with the original ending E), but, as above, timings will need to be sorted out.
Taking inspiration from my showreel, I thought the yellow background being brought on by an object would be a better look, and having a sun rise across the screen was perfect. I extended the sun's path so it would sweep up to it's final position as the O. I'd like the other letters to appear from behind this, as though they're being left behind, so have played around with a few different effects. This option feels like it could work if I play around with timings and some positioning.