Evaluating the Title Sequence

 Making the Sequence

When making the title sequence I decided to prioritise the tone and techniques I'll be using throughout the film rather than the overall plot. As I mentioned in previous posts I've been researching how To combine animation with live action. I decided to do this in two different ways for the title sequence. From my initial plan I had the vision for the poster I'd designed being animated and peeling off of either a pole or wall between the two main characters. I decided in the end that having a flat surface would be easier since I could pre draw the animation before filming the actual shot, and I think this was a good strategy since I wasn't sure how I was going to get the filming done with the weather and time constraints. 

As seen in my previous posts I took a few into to animation classes on YouTube to familiarise myself with animation basics and the software, then went ahead and did a short animation test of a paper peeling to get a sense of how this works from an animation perspective. I was quite happy with this but still decided to make a second version which also included the paper flying away as seen in the sequence. Unfortunately once I got to adding on the poster I ran into my first real speed bump using Adobe Animate. My original plan was to have the poster be on a separate layer and just erase the poster frame by frame as the animation goes on. This is when I found out that Animate is very specific about which kind of files can be edited in this way, with vectors like the poster (made in illustrator) being incompatible with this. This then led me to have to fill in the original animation frame by frame with a white shade, and then export this into Premier Pro. On Premier Pro I then made a clipping mask and had to go frame by frame masking the poster layer onto the animation. While this did work and I'm happy with the overall effect I'm aware that this process took about double the amount of time it could have. In my next animations I will be working to find a more streamlined workflow to make effects like this possible, as with the time contstraints on all of the videos spending 5 hours on an animation that could take 3 is not efficient time wise. Now that I'm more aware of the limitations that Animate gives me I'll be able to plan around this. As I mentioned a few posts ago, trying to animate on a handheld image was simply too difficult, so this time I used a tripod and found that it made the whole process much easier, while still not compromising the tone I was going for. 

Also seen a couple posts ago was an animation I tried out of the two characters walking down the street, while it was quite simple I was overall happy with the result. However when I tried putting it alongside the footage I already had it did not fit at all. I tried overlaying different textures and footage on top of it, (right) but as you can see it just wasn't working with the way the rest of the video looks. The sketchy style does fit well when put together with live action, but it is going to take quite a bit more work on my animation skills for me to get to a point where whole scenes like this are something I'm confident enough to animate in a style which works as its own standalone shot. 

My original plan was to have the vector of the poster (as seen on the left) fade into the poster on the wall. Instead I decided to have it cut and focus on another scene before this happens as I felt like there had been too much time spent focusing on the posters transition into the sequence. The way I went about this animation was far less complicated than when I used Adobe Animate. I first separated the vector of the text and exported that to edit separately, then did the same with the surrounding images. I quite like the way that text in the 60s kind of grew into the screen, and luckily this effect is quite easily achieved in premier pro by simply key framing the start and end size. I then did the same for the surrounding images. Having the text change color and zoom out to the full poster was quite fidgety in terms of having all of this blend as seamlessly as possible, including having the white background as a separate file and zooming in at a different speed, but I'm overall mostly happy with the result. My one issue with this is that due to me using the separate vectors I wasn't able to also add on the paper texture I had on the original poster, which would have made it look more real rather than completely computer generated. 

In terms of the actual filming, while it was quite fun it did present a number of challenges. As I've posted way too many times on this blog now, the camera I've been renting out generally isn't very compatible for filming in low light as it doesn't have a very broad range of ISO settings to choose from. It tried to counteract this by having a small light that we could hold up and I'm actually quite happy with the overall effect that it gave, especially at the scene with them against the wall. We put a more warm toned gel on top of the light to give it an effect almost like street lamps, and overall this seemed to work quite well. I don't think this is ideal for lighting larger scenes or scenes that involve much movement as the light had to be right next to the camera and doesn't stay very stable overall, but for the purposes of this video it did exactly what I needed it to do. As you can see in the shot of them running, the limitations of this approach become more obvious, as it starts to give a bit more of a Blair Witch vibe than a natural nighttime glow. 

The main challenge shot was was trying to get the silhouettes with the green light behind. I decided not to film that outside then once we tried inside realised I should have tried both. The goal for the shot was for the entire back to be green while only their silhouettes showed. In the video you can see two different attempts at this. The first one (left), was an interesting attempt, we had one person holding up the light behind them, and it did give some silhouette effect, the reason that the shot is so slowed down is because even after colorgrading you could still see the arm in a lot of the shot when there was any slight movement. I quite enjoyed changing the color of the light to green and the effect it had on the light of their faces. The main issue with both of these shots was how much space we had. In this shot the light bounced off of the walls on the side, but not off the further wall across from it, which was quite close to what I was going for. But still the light didn't fully fill the screen. In a bigger room with darker walls this may have worked better. 

The second attempt (right) at this shot looks better on screen, and while I wasn't particularly happy with it the classes feedback was that this was one of the best shots. This time we had the light held down by the floor and bouncing off of the door. This did create a better silhouette effect as I planned, but being able to see the door wasn't the effect I was going for. The green effect on this was achieved by some colorgrading then overlaying found footage of a green bokeh. I'm still quite happy with this shot, but I think that once again a larger space where the light won't bounce off as much would have been a better way to go about this, I'll be looking for a space to test this out soon.

Using found footage was a big part of this video. The two main videos used were an LSD documentary from I believe the 60s, as well as a US Navy training video about the dangers of LSD. Who knew the Navy had such a high animation budget? The choice to use these two sources was because of their aesthetic which is decidedly of that time, the textures of film are quite hard to make look exactly like that, and while the videos aimed to warn about the dangers of the drug, the visuals they used are still very interesting. In the past I've used footage from a Timothy Leary video and Drive In movie theatres, and I think that when using found footage I'll definitely try and stick to that era. The one time I used newer footage was in the squares behind the poster, and while they looked nice they were a bit jarring in comparison to the rest of the footage used. 

My biggest issue when editing in general is sound design. I was very happy with the music that I chose (also from the Navy Training Video), and I even used Premier Pro's remix feature to lengthen it a bit, but I have not yet had experience with sound design that goes beyond editing to music or dialogue in a podcast. This is an area which I'd really like to improve on and play around with more, so in the coming weeks I will be doing more research on this and finding online classes to take which will help me improve.