Question about titles... My illustrator doesn't use a computer!

M

markyf

Well-known member
Bless her heart. She's in Amsterdam and I kind of envy the fact that she doesn't use a computer... I love mine but can't seem to stay off it.

Anyways, she's going to do some throwback Technicolor type Hollywood titles for my short film. She's going to do them by hand and then scan them. Then I'll be trying to get them into my FCP project and lay them over my footage. If anyone has a minute and has a recommended workflow I would love to hear it. I'm very new to FCP, have never used Motion or After Effects or any other program.

Cheers!
 
If your happy with the final scanned images, you can take them into photoshop and create alpha channels. This is a pretty easy process if you are familiar with photoshop, you just cut out the titles and assign the alpa channel. Then you can export them either as .psd's or pict files which I prefer.
 
K. Great. If you were instructing her, would you get her to do them all the same size and then resize from there? Obviously the title will be bigger than the actors names, for instance, but I don't know how I want it to be and need her to get started. I think I will tell her to do them all the same size, filling out an 8.5X11 sheet of paper and I can resize from there. Make sense?
 
Well if it's just still frames she's creating she should use the same size paper and keep it all consistently to the same scale. You can tee it up in Photoshop and FCP no problem. But if she's actually creating hand drawn animation she needs an animation stand to get things accurate:

http://www.sci.fi/~animato/stand/stand.html

-Noah
 
At this point just frames. I have this highway shot (http://www.vimeo.com/1114494) which I plan on laying the titles over. The title is Breakaway. I think I will fade it in and out over three or four seconds and then do the same with the actors names. Nothing fancy. Which brings me to another question. Should I have her leave the title blank and I'll fill in the colour digitally or should I have her colour them herself? Seems like I could change my mind if I did it digitally but it might look better if she did it.

And one question on this highway shot. It's sped up, a little too fast but it actually looks slower in FCP (fits the music well). One thing I want to do is smooth out the turns. Anyone have any suggestions for this? I don't mind if it gets a bit blurry, I want it to seem a little more dreamlike.
 
To make it smoother, if you are using Final Cut Pro 7, you could apply the "smoothcam" filter to it. It will take several hours to render and make your footage slightly blurry, but really smooth.
 
Tried this. Dropped Smoothcam over it, it said 'analyzing' and I went to bed. Woke up and I had super-jittery, zoomed in, 4:3 footage? Weird. One thing I noticed is that my sequences default to interlaced and I always have to set them to progressive. Forgot to do this and it rendered the video while still in interlaced. That might be one problem. But why would it change the footage to 4:3 from 16:9?
 
Again, not knowing a thing about animation, how hard is it to do something like this?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51V1VMkuyx0

I've got about two months to get this done. The maximum amount of animation we would do would be about two minutes. Maia can really draw. I have a friend who works in production and really knows after effects. What I need to do is come up with a few scenes. The film doesn't absolutely need it but I think it could take it from good to great... along with filling a few holes in the story. Any advice?
 
I don't like the wipers in the window... but that probably has something to do with the movie so don't listen to me.
 
First sample!

1212722388.jpg
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top