VFX - The Process

When starting this project there were a lot of ideas that I thought I could approach. I started by looking at very complex title sequences like 'Seven' and 'American Horror Story' but quickly found that it'd be too difficult. In lessons, Phil showed us some examples of work that we could achieve at our beginner level of visual effects. One that stood out to me in particular was the 'Catch Me If You Can' title sequence which had lots of straight shapes and animated characters moving across the screen. I liked the idea of trying to recreate this but after looking into the animation side of things it became clear that it was too difficult of a task for me so I had to think of something new. I was browsing different title sequences on the internet and came across one for '500 Days of Summer' which stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel. The title sequence stood out to me and gave me an idea to have a chalkboard and have the chalked text write itself on the board. 

I started by converting the text into a smart object, giving me the ability to move it about independently. After this I made a trim path (which essentially was the effect of the self-writing text) on the new text. I then had to set a marker at the beginning and end of the clip and change the amount accordingly. After all of this was done I was left with chalked text that wrote itself onto the chalkboard. For the actors credit I simply found an image that I liked and thought resembled their characters the film and painted the image completely white in Photoshop before importing it back into the After Effects project. When in After Effects I simply added a fade in for the images using the markers with the opacity tool and that was about it. 

Obviously I know that given more time I could've looked into more challenging tools and techniques but with my limited knowledge of After Effects already as well as my tight schedule to finish other projects on time, I feel this is the best I could produce. Given the opportunity again I would love to try something more challenging as After Effects is such an amazing software and gives users the ability to do almost anything.