This project was created for the class DDDD.517.04 Experimental Workshop: Advanced Compositing.
The prompt was to create a 30 second title-sequence using a mix of 2D and 3D elements.

This project was concieved shortly after hearing a talk by Erin Sarofsky in which she discussed the title sequence of Captain America: The Winter Soldier. This sequence served as a primary source of stylistic inspiration.

The opening shot is a simple red arc over a map, reminiscent of an Indiana Jones travel sequence.
The map background was made using a stock paper paper and stock vector world map.

After establishing our rough location, we cut to see a fleet of World War 2 style bombers entering formation, then dropping a single nuclear payload. The plane's parallax effect was created using Nuke's 3D cards, and the stark coloring was achieved using a simple fresnel shader.

The bomb was a vector asset, and the nuclear symbol was turned into a passthrough to the red, boiling background of later scenes.

After the bomb drops, the aftermath is revealed. A red circle shows the effect of the blast, but something unexpected appears. The tentacle uses a similar shader to the bombers and wiggles around by being deformed on a curve.

We transition to an unrecognizable structure. More instrumentation is introduced to the backing track as we pan across the hideous blood chalice. Shaded with solid blacks, reds, and holdouts, the background cuts into the foreground with it's procedural blood-boiling turbulence.

We are now standing on one of the piers. A great beast waits at the other side of the chalice as a human stands in wait. Then, the beast uses its eye beams on the human. This effect was achieved using animated curves for the white lines and a combination of masking and cryptomattes in Nuke to pass the background through to the beams.

Finally, we see the human head on. The two different backgrounds are brought together as the human is haloed by the beams.

The specific audio used for this project was the first instrumental of the song Statues (Paintings, Poems, Books) by The Mommyheads. The instrumental was repeated once, and the reverb is gradually increased for the whole duration. However, this still left something to be desired. So, using a stem splitting tool, the drum and bass lines from the first verse were added into the second look of the instrumental. This helped the audio build and provided a clear differentiator between the first and second halves of the project.

Blender was used for modeling, animation, shading, and rendering.
Adobe Illustrator was used for 2D assets.
NukeX was used for compositing.
Reaper and Sesh.fm Stem Splitter were used for audio editing.
Adobe Premiere Pro was used for final compilation.
The song used is Statues (Paintings, Poems, Books) by The Mommyheads.