vfx.002

Somewhere between the first post and this I became really overwhelmed by what I wanted to do. I didn't know if I wanted to make something incredibly complex or simple but effective. The first tests I did were inspired by the A24 ident - my favourite. I wasn't sure what I was doing it for so I just used the word 'Juno'.

I had to create the letters as separate layers in Illustrator, then import them and craft their paths from one position to another. This individual comp was then imported into the following RGB comp where I set the individual channels, adjusted the size of each comp by 0.5 (as well as keyframe their length) and delayed each one by 1 frame to have the following effects.

So here's how that ended up looking:

And that's where the struggle started because I couldn't think of a way to get this to work with a credits sequence. I've always been a fan of simple, minimalist credits... so I sort of just went with what I personally wanted to do & knew would make nice opening credits.

I went through a bunch of films, looked at the atmosphere they established and ended up settling on Lady Bird. What followed was an hour of cutting out vintage lady birds from old postcards and books in Photoshop.

And then a lot of text alignment, optics, some blur, some noise, a bit of masking for an effect of glow with the use of decreasing exposure. At one point I used Motion Tile to add Wiggle effect to the text, and then ended up doing that to everyone single one of the lady birds as well. They all got keyframed to crawl across the screen.

So here's all that:

And then eventually, when everything seemed good to go, I decided to cut the credits with some scenes from Lady Bird ft. a lovely song by Junodream that I felt captured the feeling of the film really well.