It has been close to two years in the making, but today I can finally say that I’ve completed Ash Thorp’s Main Title Design course! I wish it hadn’t taken this long, but I’m proud of myself for always coming back to the lessons despite a busy schedule.
The last lesson of the course was focused on building a presentation for a client with the final homework assignment being a presentation. The presentation was supposed to include all of the work created throughout the course and curated into a single website mockup. Luckily for me I’ve been documenting my journey the whole time so I already had part of the assignment done, but I knew I wanted to do more than just reference my blog posts though so I decided to create a presentation for Six Card Poker as well as an animated title sequence.
For the presentation I wanted to focus on the best slides while keeping it short, sweet and to the point. Since I only created six slides in the last homework assignment I ended up including all of them in the presentation, but made sure to highlight the last two frames in particular since they are, what I believe to be, the hero frames. By highlighting the details in both of these frames I felt I was showing a potential client the level of detail my team and I are able to create while executing a project. [click the images below to see full presentation]
Putting the presentation together was a piece of cake compared to animating the title sequence. It was more of a challenge than I thought it would be to transition from styleframe to video.
First off, animating the photoshop files was more tricky than I imagined. Scenes built from the photoshop files felt very flat at first so I had to introduce some more motion blur to give those scenes extra dimension, depth and realness. Working with video footage was the second biggest challenge. Unfortunately my D7200 doesn’t shoot RAW footage so I knew I was going to have to manipulate a slightly compressed HD file. I didn’t have the resources to fake a darkened poker room either so I knew there was going to be some rotoscoping involved when it came to bringing the footage into After Effects, as well. Rotoscoping along with some color correcting and compositing eventually made the shot feel like it (somewhat) belonged in the sequence. It could be better improved, but given the resources I had at the time, it didn’t come out half bad.
I knew I was going to need some music to bring this title sequence over the top, too, and I feel the track I chose fits perfectly with the mood and tone of the piece. Again, there are parts of the sequence that could be improved, but for now I think it tells the story well and it shows off what I’ve learned over the past two years. Maybe someday I’ll take the time to rerender some shots and rent better equipment for a mini production shoot, but until then I feel my job here is done :)
Overall, I’m really happy with everything I’ve created while taking this course. I’ve learned SO much from Ash and his production workflow, and I’ve enjoyed learning how he masters his craft. I am planning to take the new skills I’ve learned from Main Title Design and applying them to many projects going forward.
Feel free to check out the Learnsquared page of my website where I’ve put together some of my favorite pieces from this course and referenced every blog post from the journey.
Thank you for following along the past couple of years! I hope you enjoyed my journey as a student again.
Six Card Poker by Caroline Le
Music: The Portal by Origami Pigeon
Licensed by: PremiumBeat.com