Documentary Series Title Sequence
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The challenge for this animation was to create a title sequence that would be used for a three-part documentary series about how scientists are tapping into cultural history to find new medicinal discoveries. The series, called "Ancient Roots, Modern Medicine," was being prepared to hopefully air on PBS, BBC Worldwide, and other high-profile venues, so we wanted something that was visually on par with other broadcast television series.
It had to include footage from all three parts of the documentary series, and specific shots were required to be in the final product.
We had several hours of video footage to select from to build the title sequence. The series editor culled that down to some of the most dynamic shots, and I took those and produced the final animation.
The animation was produced using Adobe Photoshop, Adobe After Effects, and Macromedia Flash. Apple QuickTime was used as the media layer. The entire process was done using a single desktop dual G5 Macintosh running OS X.
One particular challenge of this series opener is that when work began on the opener, we only had footage from two of the three episodes, but the project required footage from all three! To accommodate this, I used placeholder footage from the first two series to block out the animation and effects and get it all synced to the music, and later swapped in footage from the third episode when it became available. For the most part, this worked quite well, since we were able to find footage that had much in common with the placeholders I chose, but in a few cases, it required some reorganization of the visible elements.
Flash was used to draw the handprint used in the background in the initial part of the sequence, which was brought into After Effects and animated to create the larger backdrop as a separate composition. Because it was a rather processor-intensive composition, I rendered it out as separate footage so that it wouldn't have to recompute it every frame while working. (This backdrop was later used on the motion menu for the promotional DVD.) A similar technique was used for the 'GATTACA' backdrop later in the title sequence, but for that, I didn't need to start in Flash; instead, I just used After Effects' built-in typography engine. (Fun fact: the letter sequences on that backdrop were taken from the actual DNA sequence of a plant.)
Photoshop was used to extract elements and re-introduce them in interesting ways (such as the solarized butterfly in the first part of the sequence), to create knock-out masks (such as for the reddish plant that the sequence opens with), and to generate source images for some of the text effects (such as the treatment of the "Ancient Roots, Modern Medicine" logo at the end).
However, the lion's share of the project involved creative manipulation of the existing footage in After Effects. This was mostly done with direct adjustments to the raw hue, saturation, blur, size, position, compositing mode, and opacity of the video layers, and a lot of experimentation. (In other words, you're not just seeing the result of some 'stylize video' plug-in filter.) I wanted a frenetic, stream-of-consciousness sort of feel, so I used a lot of time remapping, jittery motion, bleeding of elements over borders, double-exposures, and overexposures. I'm particularly happy with the metallic speed-glow on the pharmaceutical pan, and the action on the words 'Modern Medicine' at the end. Many of the animated effects use several sub-compositions to create the final look.
This project was great fun. A personal goal for this project was to push into new areas of After Effects that I hadn't used before. In particular, I experimented with motion math and expressions (the turning hands were not actually animated by hand - rather, they compute their rotation on a frame-by-frame basis using a mathematical expression), time remapping (which I hadn't played with before), and some computationally large, multi-layered effects (like the greenish organic cloud effect applied to the 'Ancient Roots' text at the end of the opener - that effect is by far the most intricate in the animation, requiring five separate sub-compositions to achieve). I learned a lot on this project.