Title Sequence Development

The process for creating a moving double exposure effect took a little time for me to work out and perfect. This ate into quite a lot of my day but luckily I found something that works well for me and creates a good looking final image. Firstly I found a shot of the character closeup I wanted to use:

Once I had this I could then isolate the actor from the background. To do this I used tool called the RotoBrush. Ideally it would be good to have the actor on a green screen as you could just key out the green and be left with a clean isolation of just the actor. However, I only had the footage so I used the RotoBrush to cut out the actor throughout the whole shot and was left with this:

Now that I had the actor isolated I needed to find an interesting video element to go over the top of him and to be used for the double exposure. I went through some B-roll I shot a little while ago for my showreel and found this shot:

Once I had the shot I wanted I popped it into the composition and coloured it to fit with the idea I had in my head. I also re-possitioned it so that the main interesting part of the frame sat over the actors face:

Now I simply place this layer underneath the isolated actor layer and change the layer so that it uses the isolated layer as a track matte. This basically looks at the alpha of the layer above it and cuts the layer it is applied to to follow that alpha. The RotoBrush had cut out the background and left only the pixels of the actor so I was left with a filled in outline of his body:

So once the effect was applied the B-roll layer was only visible in the pixels where the actors body was in the frame, leaving me with this:

That's half way there but to really finish off the effect I wanted to add some displacement to the footage to add a little detail and interest. To do so I duplicated the original isolated layer and made it black and white. I then pushed the contrast using the Curves effect. This leaves me with a black and white layer that I gave a white background to. The displacement plugin works by looking at values within the spectrum of colours both light and dark and moving the pixels of the applied layer according to how bright or dark the referenced layer is in those positions:

Once the displacement layer was added to the footage layer, and the black and white reference layer was made the input source for the displacement, this is what I was left with:

To really finish off the effect and incorporate back in the style I established in the poster design I added a grey background layer, a border and wrote the typography in the font I chose previously (Akkurat Pro):

Then that was the effect complete. I think it looks really good and am really happy with how it all came out. I did the same for the female leads part of the titles using a shot of her I thought would work well and some stock footage of water then animated on the title font in an engaging way. Then I was finished.