Title Sequence PROJECT

For this project, I decided to try to make a title sequence for a made up company that makes horror films--Grim Studios. My original idea was to create letters that moved as if they were alive, because they were running from Death or the Grim Reaper. Death would touch the letters, they would fall down, and the flesh would rot to reveal bones, which would then turn into dust and get blown away. To do this, I needed Maya 2011, but our trial ran out and so I had to make the letters as 2D images in Photoshop, and use the shatter effect in After Effects to make 3D text. To do that, I disabled gravity so that the images wouldn't move down, and changed the custom shatter map to the layers themselves. I hardly did anything like this, because a lot of time was spent looking for tutorials on how to do the effects I wanted, and many of them required plug-ins. There was also a side project that our entire class was doing as a group, and that ate up a lot of time.

I had to scale down my idea a lot, and instead I added an effect called particle world i to simulate rain. I imported each 3D letter as compositions, because I wanted them to be able to move independently. However, they don't move at all in this version so that is a little irrelevant. Because they were imported as compositions, I had to make a new solid for the rain to go on, or else it would only cover one letter at a time and the whole effect would be ruined. In the effect, I changed the radius of the effect , the birth and death color of the individual particles, the particle type, and the physics of the particles in order to create the illusion of rain. I got a skeleton hand off of google images for Death, and added a distortion effect  to each letter composition to look like melting flesh, which was easier to do than rotting flesh. Then I synchronized the beginning of the distortion to the frame that the hand touches them in.