The Title Sequence
As all movies always start with a animated logo appearing.
It inspires me to create 1 for my group. It features a door opening, and 3 camera man's silhouette that I have illustrated, jogs out from the left. The name of the group drops down soon after the camera man animation stops. The logo then fades away to my opening scene.
The beauty of fine arts is to tell a story through a still image. However, I feel that I am always limited to portraying more emotions while doing so during my art classes in secondary school. I always wanted to use illustrations to tell a story. Thus, I decided to animate a flow of illustrations that I have hand drawn, and enhanced using photoshop. Using after effects allows me to create a visual impact to tell a story.
I am very inspired by this opening sequence from the movie "Catch Me If You CAN".
However, it would take a lot of time to actually be able to use after effects to animate the characters. Thus I only did a small part of hardcore animation for a few secs for my opening sequence. Where the rest of the parts were using linear wipes or basic transitions.
Using various methods that I have learn and experiment to create randomness to enhance a mysterious effect of the couple flowing out. This effects were scale wipe, turbulence displace, and linear wipe.
Using a external camera method that I have learn during project 1 to control the camera to zoom into the hands of the couple and transits to a close up shot of the hands.
The camera will then follow the movement of a small root plunging out from the hands. Using linear wipe to create a growing effect of the root. The root slowly forms small routes, depicting the life of the couple, and slowly forms a silhouette of the couple carrying a baby.
I then came across camera movement complications, due to technical difficulties to place images for the next image to flow out. Pre-composite the layers and add a new camera to reanimate the camera movement to continue with the flow, which grants me more ease to animate my title sequence.
The new camera continues to move, as a road accident starts to flow out. This is where I want to illustrate the death of the mother.
The road continues and flows out to a graveyard, depicting the father bring the son to pay their respect to the mother.
I drew a bigger tombstone that pushes its way into the scene, to create a zoom in transition to focus on the 2 character. The son watches the father cry, as he was too young to understand what happened. Animating the tears to twirl and curl to flow out of the father's eyes and drops from the face, was the most difficult problem that I came across. At first I animate it to just literally drop from the eyes. But soon, I remembered that I could alter the shape of the tear using turbulent displace and animate the tear to swing from left to right a little before dropping off and scaling into a bigger tear.
This tears the drops down and forms a puddle of tears. Initially, the puddle of tears was just a plain puddle image that I drew. But using the ripple effect, I could alter it to animate like real water animation.
Then animating the layer to scale up and rotate upwards to cover the whole camera screen into a black screen. A extra tear drops down again. However this special tear was done using a photoshop image that I created using the footage that was going to appear after the title sequence. The photoshop image is then altered into a round looking liquid, using CC lens effect. Controlling the size and convergence of the lens effect, to form back the layer to its original state, which is the father holding a handphone. Controlling both position and scaling, to enhance the animation of this special tear to look as if its really dropping from above and plunging into the puddle of tears.
After the tear forms back into its original state. The father silhouette breaths out a black smoke generated using particles effect, which is tilted and altering gravity to form a curve smoke and linear wiping with turbulence displace. The smoke forms the short film title "Last Breath".
There are also some credits that will introduce the actors in this short film. The credits are done using smoke generated particles, and linear wiping with turbulence displace as well.
The scene fades off to the footage. Using the converting scene from day to night tutorial to create a evening tone to the footage that are mask together to form 1 composition. Tracking 2 adjustment layers consisting of light ray and lens flare to the motorcycles' light to add detail to the evening environment. Increasing the intensity of the lens flare over time as it comes closer to the camera.
The problem faced in this scene, was masking the movement of the father, as there were no green screen available for us to use. I have to make sure that almost 1-3 frames, the mask is kept as close as possible to the father.
The collision scene also consist of the light shining effect that has its source light infront of the father. The scene timing is also being extended to slow down the speed of the video.
The video:
