Ever since I first read Black Easter or Faust Aleph-Null by James Blish back in the mid 80s, I thought it would make a great film or mini-series. Sadly though, it’s never been filmed, but as part of my University course in Creative Digital Media, I’ve made a title sequence for it…
The main inspiration for this is a title sequence with a much bigger budget and a quite different feel – the fully 3D modeled wartime posters used in the recent Captain America: The First Avenger movie. This is my attempt to work similar magic with my Macintosh, taking renaissance paintings and turning them into three-dimensional elements that work with both hand animated swirls and flourishes and digitally rendered 3D skulls (models courtesy of the free Halloween Pack from Video Copilot). I’m really pleased with how this has worked out, I was always worried that the disparate elements would not gel together, or that the methods I used to cheat 3D from stills would look tacky rather than mysterious, but careful use of depth of field effects, and some tasty fire effects from Video Copilot’s Action Essentials 2 which I bought at a steep discount over Christmas, manage to tie everything together stylistically.
While I’ve used a lot of recognisable works of art, all my source material is in the public domain, the copyright having expired. The music is edited down my me from Bach’s Toccata and Fuge in D-Minor (or if my spell checker gets it’s way, Toccata and Fudge) arranged for synthesiser and samples using Propellerheads Reason and the wonderful Valhalla Room for reverb. See my previous blog posts for a tutorial on the 3D process, and how I made some of the elements that went into this title sequence. If there’s anything you are particularly interested in, please feel free to ask about in the comments section.
As usual, this video is CC licensed, so you are free to use it for non-commercial purposes. In the unlikely event you want to make commercial use of it please ask. I’ll probably say yes, and give you the original files too.
