The Chemist
A creative exercise in title design.
Title Design Exploration.
In the many fields of animation, title design is one that blends design and movement in an idealized balance. Iconic designs for Game of Thrones, True Detective, West World, and more helped to drive a fascination with how to distill the idea of a show down to a beautiful sequence of visuals. At the time I created this project, I was between two freelance jobs and had three days to jump into a personal project. I wanted to work on a title sequence for an imaginary film or television show that focused on flowing colors and complex gradients. Rather than focusing on complex 3D models or high resolution simulations, I wanted to create something abstract that blurred the line between practical and computer generated. The resulting frames are the product of those three days, using randomly generated names, I ended with a full deck of frames for an imaginary show called 'The Chemist'.
The Setup.
The visuals are created by using a cloth simulation from Houdini and applying a chrome, perfectly reflective material to the resulting mesh. By using a cloth simulation, I was able to achieve a high level of complexity with minimal input as well as having a readily animated base if I wanted to move from styleframes into animation. The colors come from painted HDRI maps with blocks of different colors placed at different locations in the sky box. When shot with a macro lens with a shallow depth of field, the resulting image is painterly, complex, and flowing despite the setup being so simple. I never ended up animating this piece, but the basic principle of the setup is easily transferable into motion.
