Evaluation OUGD202

The chosen subject for this brief was Top Ten Gangster Films. The reason for choosing this subject was that I wanted a dark gritty base to form the video on, gangsters being a good start.

The research I was looking into at the time was titles from Tropic Thunder, RocknRolla etc. The visual investigations to AE were more towards Photoshop based files that animate in After Effects. What really captured my eye was ink bleeds and artistic strokes being revealed and painted out, examples such as “Silver Sun Pickups – Swoon”. Other research includes cartoon and comic art animated in a very unclean raw state, hard edges, almost undeveloped however this obviously the intended finish. The advertisement I was looking at were things such as the Cadbury Gorilla advert. What I found most effective about this was the slow build up with the inevitable breakdown of the music. Just when the viewer thinks they understand the pace of video, it’s quickly shifted.

Choosing the title films for the show was researched using websites such as IMDB and Rotten Tomato. I looked at both user opinions and film critiques opinions from various other sites to compile the main list and threw in a few British films on top to make it more relevant to a UK show. The chosen channel for the show was C4. The reason due to the similarity of existing shows shown on that channel and the time of ten pm. Top 10 at 10pm.

The music I was looking at was Russian/Italian soundtracks taken from various movie soundtracks researched. The chosen soundtrack to run throughout the video was “Ruskies”, a track taken from the 2000 feature film Snatch.

The initial design work was looking painting over existing iconic imagery from a selection of the films. I started off with an image of the Godfather. The image as taken from Google, colour dropped and painted over using a Wacom to achieve an artistic hand drawn effect. When taken to after effects I experimented using various layers with the Vector Paint tool to slowly paint out individual sections of the image to give the effect that it was being drawn up.

To add some dynamic to the video it was decided that the images would pan around a large textured background. To achieve this I researched some large format texture images of rocks and blended them together using PS. The layers where then parented to the background so that they would stay fixed to the map as the layer moved around.

I was experiencing lot difficulties trying to get the panning to work correcting. Originally I was using all the animated comps in a larger composition, which was parented to the motion of the background. However the complexity of all layers individually animating was causing the file to be almost unworkable.

To get a around this, I enlarged the frame of the original video files (Scarface and Godfather). With a larger background I was then able to mask off the hard edge and have the video file sit softly on the texture background. The comp was then made of 2 videos and the background fixing the running issues and was also a lot easier to work with.

The images are laid out in such as way that they are not centred. Origionally the plan was to incorporate text that would be introduced at the same time as voice over quote. However the text wasn’t really working and the advice from a crit was to loose it altogether as it distracted from the imagery. Could have been developed to work with the video a little better but I don’t think the video is lacking without it.


From advice in crits the video was too linear with nothing interesting and nothing unexpected. From this I decided to create a change in mood. The video now took on darker, grittier side just over half way in. The animation of the boxing glove was used to try and lift the flat paintings and make the video seem more interactive/varied.

I also wanted to get more gritty and darker with the audio and look after the mood switch, so the colour gets a much darker tone, which slowly dips up and down to mimic lighting. The power down fade to black also acts a marker from where the mood shifts and a nice synth soundtrack was added, taken from the film Godfather 2.

The main issues I have with my title sequence is that in my eyes it probably works better as a 50 second advert as appose to title sequence. I’m not sure why it feels like this, maybe because there is so much going on? If I had to revisit this, it would be something I’d have to review to adept to create a more fitting sequence as in my opinion, it’s not quite working as a title sequence yet.