TITLE SEQUENCE

Well hello my name is Carey and today we’re gonna critique a motion design project, give it a huge makeover, and talk about a bunch of powerful ways you can improve your own work!

So… wwwwwwwow it’s been a stretch. I’ve been workin on making some heavy duty design classes and today we’re upgrading a title sequence storyboard submitted by one of the students of those classes. And lemme tell you it’s gonna get a bucket of sex dust dumped on it. Now that’s awesome because storyboarding is really where you’re designing the look and feel and all the cool stuff that’s gonna happen in your animation or film, so it’s where you really start creating something of your own from scratch.

Now, we explored how I design storyboards a little bit in episode 002 a while back, and we explore it in much more depth in the more recent master class “Style & Strategy”. But now we’ve got the Visual Design Lab, which is a full course with video chapters and big projects and critiques and community, and we’re gonna tear into the final project for the lab by a designer who’s already completed the course, Miguel Ortiz. He has very kindly offered to be our sacrificial lamb, so we’re gonna take full advantage of that and sssslap his work around. Links to his stuff down in the description.

Miguel decided to design a title sequence for a show about American soldiers near the end of WWII in the battle of Iwo Jima, an island off of Japan. His storyboard is really interesting. It’s also a little gory, but we’ll talk about that. Hang on to your pants.

Now, a title sequence is where you’d normally have the show title and the main credits, and his storyboard, as you can see, doesn’t have a title or credits, because this is an imaginary show so it doesn’t have that stuff. And I’m glad, because we’re not really concerned with that for this particular project. We’re concerned with whether the design of the sequence itself is good. Is it fun or charming or beautiful or interesting or inspiring, does it keep the viewers’ attention? Once it has their attention, what does it convey to them, how does it make them feel, do they come away with a specific impression or some new understanding. Basically, is it likable or attractive enough to grab their attention and then impart an experience, a feeling, or something meaningful.

So, is this doing any of that? Yeah, there’s a lot to like here. It may not be everyone’s cup of tea, because it feels messy and handmade and there are images of war. It’s somber, and it’s dealing with serious subject matter. But it’s doing that pretty well, which is great! But how is it doing any of that? That’s the question that’s gonna tell us how we can make it even better, so we’ve gotta dig into it to figure that out. We’ve gotta look at it critically. And we can start by just looking at the really obvious stuff that’s right on the surface. So what do we see? We can see that a lot of it is based on black and white photos, and that’s mixed with some painterly stuff… ink washes, splatters… it’s a type of collage. The photos, specifically, are mainly of soldiers from the middle of last century, which feels kind of journalistic and historical. In some cases the elements are faded and eroded, sometimes liquidy, and that makes it feel slightly dreamy as a result, right? The color palette is really subdued, mostly grey and sepia-tone with some hints of desaturated blues in here, and then of course there are these vibrant reds that are really the focal points in a lot of the frames. And in the context of old images of soldiers at war, that flowing red pretty obviously references blood, and there’s an awwwful lot of it. But you put these things together, and you can get a feel for what the general topic is here.

And the way they’re put together is kind of creating a mood, right? There’s sort of an attitude about, or a perspective on what’s going on here. Y’know, it’s about a battle, but it’s kind of lamenting that battle. It evokes thoughts about difficult times, difficult memories. Y’know, as opposed to some other narrative about war that might instead focus on heroicism, guns and explosions and kickin bad guys in the nuts or whatever. There’s some of that here, but it seems like it has a more purposeful point to make. That this is more about the cost of war, and it uses its own dreamy collaged kind of storytelling to do that, which is really cool. You can tell that it’s heartfelt, even if there are some things about it that don’t make as much sense as they could. And it looks good, but there are some places where it could potentially look nicer. I think we can get it looking even better so it pulls the viewer into its world, and once it has their attention, is even clearer about what it’s trying to do.

And there’s a lot that goes into that, but to hack away at some of that, we’re gonna do this in 3 parts, where we’ll look at 3 important categories of things to consider here: Signifiers, Story beats, and Visual Pacing, and how we can impact each of these things with simple design decisions, while also improving the look and feel.

So to start, it turns out that this whole sequence was sort of birthed out of this initial frame (05). It’s kind of gory and messy, but it’s also a kind of poignant and beautiful idea. And in this first part we’re just gonna focus on this one frame, because it feels like it has some things going on I can already work with.

Ok so where do “signifiers” come into play here? Well, for example, You might recognize this shape here, because it’s based on a memorial for american soldiers that’s modeled after a famous photograph taken in the battle of Iwo Jima. Pretty good indicator of the general topic right?. Well, mostly. In the US, both the photo and statue are pretty recognizeable to people, who will of course have all kinds of thoughts and feelings about them, since war is obviously really politically and emotionally charged. In other words, this image he’s used “signifies” a lot of things to a lot of people. Now, signifiers are a broad category, but basically, they’re just things that mean stuff. Pretty simple, but suuuuch a useful idea for helping you keep track of what your design is saying, and how it’s doing saying it. Because each little element and even the individual details of those elements may have some meanings to your audience that you might specifically want, or you might specifically want to chuck into the garbage.

You look at this and you know roughly what it is, it’s a fabric. And all the little details about it tell you things like that it’s relatively high quality, and it’s probably warm. Y’know, you pick up different things than you do looking at this, which has different qualities, different details. But it’s tougher to guess what anyone’s thoughts are beyond that because neither of these points you toward anything super specific. But if we add some more details, you’re getting some more specific ideas now: it’s not just fabric, it’s clothing, probably for men, and it’s probably expensive. So maybe you’re getting some vague notions about wealth or class or a dozen other things, because the qualities of these elements signify things, and grouped together they point toward slightly more complex ideas than just nice warm fabric. If we bring in a bunch more, we can make those vague notions even more specific. Wealth. Privilege. Aristocracy? And so forth. Combined in the right ways, and chosen for their specific qualities, individual signifiers can come together to collectively signify more complicated things. And that seems obvious, but being really aware that this is happening with everything you make is really useful.

[war memorial] Like here. This image signifies things, by being a collection of smaller signifiers. The waving flag, the cast metal, the gigantic pedestal it’s mounted on, the gold plaque, the manicured grass and the rope that effectively says “THIS IS SPECIAL. DON’T EVEN THINK ABOUT TOUCHING THIS”. Y’know, this image already has a lot of signifiers that come together to mean things, and then added up together to depict a memorial on a pedestal in the nation’s capital, the whole complex scene signifies a whole possible range of much more complicated things to different people depending on their associations to it. You might have one set of thoughts, and your neighbor might have another. Just the idea of a war memorial, or this one in particular, makes different people think different things, and have different feelings. They might start thinking about expensive statues, or about national parks, or that we memorialize war heroes more than we do doctors. They might just be jealous of this beautiful weather, or thinking about the lawn care involved here. Who knows?!

And some of those thoughts might align with the feelings and intentions this frame is trying to convey but there are many more that probably don’t, and Miguel doesn’t want all of those other ideas in here. He has something more specific to say. So it’s smart that he’s not using all of those signifiers, he’s stripping out a lot of those unwanted details, to the point that he’s really reduced it to just a silhouette. He’s leaving some very recognizeable shapes, but eliminating some of the signifiers that don’t help the story he wants to tell. He’s abstracting it from this to this so it’s not the war memorial. It’s not even a statue. It’s a kind of illustration that alludes to some of the same things that the war memorial does, but not all of them. Not even most of them. A silhouette by itself can signify a lot of things, it can tell you a lot about what’s going on, so he’s done what he can to strip out some of the meanings in this image that he doesn’t want. Blue skies, mowed grass and crowd control ropes, plaques and pedestals, but also the qualities that make it feel like a statue: the metal texture and all of the lighting and 3-dimensionality.

Of course, there are still some things in this image that he does want. Some things that he’s left in and that you recognize and understand. You recognize that it’s some soldiers raising a flag. You can tell that it’s a team effort, and it’s really a huge effort. Just from their posture you can tell they’re really heaving this thing. It’s a struggle. And those things alone might convey broad ideas about the power of human effort and determination. Or maybe it makes you think of patriotism and sacrifice. Or on the other end of things, maybe you see the tyranny and violence of empires. He’s narrowed it down so you’re probably not thinking about weather or lawn clippings, but there are still lots of possible interpretations. Lots of equally right ideas implied here.

But he’s not even trying to convey all of those ideas, he’s focused on something even more specific. I think he’s trying to get you to think more along the lines of the personal costs of war. The burdens that soldiers bear. And this alone might make you think about that, but it also might make you think of other stuff, or maybe not much at all. It doesn’t focus solely on that idea, so what he’s done next is added new signifiers like the inky liquids, so that collectively all of these things start to point to that more specific idea. This liquid fill feels murky and impermanent. And this isn’t actually blood, but in the context of this silhouette of soldiers, turning it red sure makes us think of blood, and then that makes us think of these guys spilling their blood, or spilling the blood of others. Either way, like the flowing inks, the blood is treated in a way that makes it seem impermanent too. It’s slowly running off the page. It’s washing away.

It’s not perfect, but those ideas of murkiness and impermanence, blood draining or washing away… that’s kind of great. Kind of combines the idea of lives draining away, and the memories of them becoming more faint. It’s sort of poignant. But I think it could do that better. It could do with some help.

Like, these particular red fluid streaks kind of look like tentacles, don’t they? So for unexpected reasons, these random ink flows signify, like… octopus. Do we want people to think of some kind of nightmare sea creature? That’s an idea, but it’s kind of a stretch. The Kraken doesn’t make a ton of sense for this topic, so maybe we can exclude that idea by using the red in a way that looks less like tentacles. To start, I’m gonna try to stay pretty close to the original and just clean it up a bit, so that said, I’m gonna chuck a lot of this stuff and rebuild it, but stick to using the elements that he was using. Based on a guideline in one of the other projects in the lab, he had made a bunch of raw materials by mixing ink and olive oil and paints and grabbing shots of the results on his phone, which is really great. So I’m gonna use those same images, but I’ll start by defining the edges of each of these guys so that I can follow their shapes with some of these liquids and be more intentional about how the figures start to flow and drain away.

Delineating each of these figures means creating some contrast between their shapes. In the design lab we talk a lot about how and when to create different types of contrast using scale, texture, density, depth and so forth to make your images more striking, but also for important structural stuff like defining shapes and guiding the eye. Here I’m doing that in an obvious way, just with a dark shape up against a brighter shape. Pretty simple. And defining these edges and getting some value contrast between the elements also helps us get just a little bit of depth between them because now we can see which one is in front of the other. And it helps highlight those edges, which then helps me see where I can place the inks to have them flow seamlessly off of their bodies, so I can create that impression of the soldiers draining away.

And like in Miguel’s image, I want them struggling to move to one way, while they drain away in the other direction, like they’re leaving a trail of themselves as they fade away. I mean, it’s kind of a poetic idea, and one worth really exploring. But it’s a little tricky to fashion all of these different ink images into something cohesive and natural-looking. And it’s gonna take some experimenting to figure out what parts of these handmade images to use, how to use them, and where they should go in order to make it look like it’s all draining away, let alone also figure out how the roots fit back into this whole idea, if they do at all!

Because Miguel’s idea is this: “The roots woven into the characters represent their connection to each other, man to man, Japanese to American. As well as their connection to the earth and where they come from (as in, don't forget your "roots”).” Now, that’s an interesting take. It’s a visual metaphor that could work, but I don’t feel like it is working. The idea might have potential, but I’m not really sold on the way it’s executed where people just have limbs missing and replaced with roots. That doesn’t convey a connection between people, or with the earth. It might work in this frame (07), where someone is actually returning to the earth. That metaphor makes sense. He’s literally becoming woven into the landscape. But again, it’s a LOT. And it’s really gory. Aesthetically, the roots provide some contrast to the fluid stuff with their thin strokes branching off and darting at different angles. But as I keep working with them, I keep scaling them down and hiding them amongst the other elements because they just don’t help the overall ideas enough to warrant as much attention as they’re getting. They’re cool, but they mostly signify the wrong things. Kind of creepy things.

Something that signifies the right things is this photo from the actual battle itself that I’m repositioning. I mean, I think we already get that this frame is about war, so I don’t need to beat anyone over the head by making this a super prominent element, but it definitely relates to the subject matter, and it has that quality of black and white war photojournalism that’s really authentic, and speaks to the real history of events, whereas this thing I’m building over here is more illustrative and impressionistic. So it’s a meaningful addition, but like the roots it’ll just take figuring out how important it should be. How much attention it should get.

And this is really an issue of what we call “visual hierarchy”. In most compositions, there may be lots of things to look at. And a good designer will decide which amongst those things are most important, and which are least important. Which ones you need to see first and then maybe second and third for it to all make sense when you look at the frame. And it makes sense that a good designer will get you to look first at that most important element by making it more attention-grabbing than the other stuff. Drawing your eye to it first by using a host of strategies centered around types of contrast, so for example, by making it bigger than other elements, or brighter, or more densely detailed, or using a stand-out color, or all of the above and then some. By making that element contrast the other elements enough that it gains visual prominence. And by giving one thing more visual prominence, they’re creating a visual hierarchy. Even in more dense compositions, they’re telling your eyeballs “Hey, over here! Look here first before you look elsewhere”.

And while working with this, it’s becoming apparent to me that this should really be the most prominent element. What’s happening here should be the real story, but right now, it’s only kind of more visually important than everything else. It’s somewhat darker, and it’s shapes are a little crisper, and it’s about the same size as this faded stuff. And when you’re trying to make one element definitely the centerpiece, and some others a distant second, realizing that your main element is somewhat more of this, and a little bit less of that, and kind of the same in some other way, is a pretty good sign that it needs to contrast your other elements by a whooooole lot more.

So here’s where we’re gonna break pretty radically with the original composition. Instead of these two things having relatively equal weight in the frame, kind of different, but sorta not… I’m gonna stop pansy-assing around. This is it. This element is definitively what the frame is about. There’ll still be secondary imagery, but it’ll be much less important in the frame than this. It’ll be lower on the visual hierarchy. Because I want this big and bold and the undisputed center of this story, and really the center of the whole sequence, but we’ll talk about that later. Now, making this so huge obviously changes the composition pretty drastically, but I’ve got a version saved so I can play with this and try to make it work.

So now the effort is on all fronts: getting the inks to look natural while keeping these guys visible. And figuring out where I can put those inks without filling the whole frame in with darkness, and where to leave some bright areas so we can see clearly what’s going on. And how much of it should be blood red and where to put that so it doesn’t look like a horror movie poster. And how much this background battle should still call attention to itself. Right now what’s left of that image just looks like detailed chaos, and you wouldn’t even know it’s an actual battle scene because none of the signifiers of it are left, like little army guys, so I need to bring those back into prominence.

There’s lots and lots of testing to see how adding one thing affects the others. Lots of balancing of values and of details while trying to keep some order so there’s not just crazy shit everywhere. For example, these highlights on the shirts and helmets help give the soldiers bodies some details so we can really see what they’re doing. Just little hints of detail that tell us stuff the silhouette alone can’t quite convey. But I need to transition from soldier to ink somewhere, so where do the details stop and the inks start? How little of the shirt detail is actually necessary to let us see these guys as 3-dimensional? I’m leaving in a lot of the details on this guy so you can see how his body is twisting and heaving. But up top, this guy’s kind of lost in the mix because I’ve covered over his details, and he’s kinda cropped out of the frame. It’s much harder to pick that guy out.

How much of the original roots do I actually want to include? How prominent do i want that idea to be? Again, I don’t think they signify quite the right thing, but it’s not totally ridiculous either, and aesthetically it’s kind of awesome. These sharp organic lines are a nice little detail amongst all of these blurry shapes. But I have to make sure they’re really only something you notice after looking at the frame for a while because I don’t want them screaming for attention and confusing the point here. I like them, but they’ll be hidden sparsely amongst the more important stuff so they’re way down on the visual hierarchy of importance. You’ll notice them late, if you notice them at all.

And I’m shifting the angle that some of these liquids seem to flow in, to kind of get the elements pointing more in this diagonal direction, so as these guys are pulling this way, they’re leaving a trail of themselves behind. And what’s cool is that doing that kind of jostles everything so that I can see some new opportunities, one of which is that there may be a good space for some kind of secondary detail down here. Like these planes. And they’re not actually in any of the original designs, but I’m grabbing them anyway because they’re still appropriate to the topic. And in this image specifically, they’re dark and have that same sort of diagonal thrust so they won’t contrast too much with what’s goin on down here and steal attention from our main thing.

I also just want a little bit of activity in the upper left corner, so I’m gonna borrow this smoke element from one of the other frames. With this guy’s dark silhouette up against some really bright values, the edges of his body are fairly easy to pick out, but adding this dark grey smoke decreases that contrast along those edges, making him harder to spot. So I’m carefully painting brighter values in the smoke so that dark edge is still visible. I’m constantly taking care to make sure that certain things stay visible amongst all of these elements so it doesn’t all turn into a mess where you can’t tell what’s going on. And then I’m obscuring other elements that I don’t want getting too much attention. Using different types of contrast to not only delineate and clarify certain elements, or even just parts of elements, but also to dictate which stand out as important, and which fade into the surroundings as secondary details. All of that helps make it look better and helps the audience read what’s happening so they can then go on to understand that it’s about something more than guns and kickin dudes in the nuts.

And I think with that in there, it’s lookin pretty good. One thing I didn’t intend on is that this smoke kind of makes it look like this stuff down below could also be fire. Like, squint your eyes for a second to make this look blurry, and some of the white inks look like flames and the whole thing could be logs on a bonfire, right? Unintended, but I think that’s a pretty interesting addition to the ideas here. Something you might feel more subconsciously than anything. That’s kind of an awesome bonus.

Personally, I think this is pretty great. I’m proud of this one, even if it’s really just a remix. The original is great in its own way. It has something to say about its subject, a perspective on it. It’s more than just visual noise and gimmicks, it actually gives the audience something to think about and feel, which is really the point in this kind of project, but is also a hard thing to accomplish. My version focuses on what I think are the more compelling ideas, while hopefully toning down some others. And that means highlighting certain signifiers. The soldiers are much more prominent, and they have some identifiable details in them to push it more toward the authenticity of the photography instead of something that appears completely illustrated. No more tentacles, no more hill in the background. No more flag even, because I think we can reveal that as part of a different story beat elsewhere in the sequence, which we’ll talk about in the next two parts.

You can see lots of reasons why identifying the signifiers in your work is such powerful skill. It’s so helpful to know what the major, and even minor, elements might be indicating to your audience, both alone and as collections that add up to signify the complex things you’re really trying to convey. That’s what helps you figure out if your imagery feels right, or is saying the right thing, and if not, what you can adjust to get it there. But in the next part of this series, we’ll tackle some of these other frames and talk more about story. Once you have your viewer’s attention, how do you add up the details into something they’re really gonna be into, and then how do you evolve that and lay it out over a sequence of images or shots. And then in the 3rd part, we’ll talk more about pacing. Dialing the images up or down in various ways to take your audience on an even more dynamic ride. Putting them on an emotional roller coaster and really giving them an experience.

Whether your take on a topic is gritty and photographic, or more illustrative, or even something completely abstract; working in live action, or with vectors, or full on 3d, the stuff we’re talking about here applies to every medium, and to whatever style you’re into. And it’s the stuff that really makes or breaks what you’re doing. From the basics of controlling contrasts to give you power over what your elements signify individually, to how they work as a coordinated collection, all the way up to managing how all of that feels to your audience, and how they’re gonna relate to it. Aka, “is your shit rad”

As this series goes on, we’ll look at all different types of design. We’ll talk about how to make your own work more compelling, or more beautiful or dynamic, and we’ll critique some stuff, do paintovers, and even reworks like this. For the time being, I’ll draw from the huge number of design lab submissions because we already have an awesome bunch of wide-ranging projects to choose from, but in the future we’ll look at your stuff and mine and anyone who wants it, so we can thoroughly embarrass ourselves together. 😀

For now, we’re full steam ahead on this one! So get ready for part 2! See you soon!