Title Screen, End Credits
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2024
Title Screen, End Credits, and Promotional Assets for a Short Film by Judy Lieff
Working with film maker, Judy Lieff, I worked on some graphic elements to support her work, Duties of My Heart. Using a poem of the same name by Barbara Barg, the film features deaf poet Terrylene, performing the poem is ASL, while cutting between dancers who "illuminate this poem of resistance."
While the titles were created more traditionally in After Effects, for the end credits I wrote a python script to generate the screens, allowing for maximum design control, content flexibility, and (hopefully!) reusability.
(Features licensed fonts from Oh No Type Co)
The global settings helped me explore and control the "style guide" for the end credits. I could easily explore fonts, typography scale, and gaps/margins across every screen in the end credits at once. This also helped me maintain consistency, without having to really think about it or work to hard to achieve it.
Using a scale factor meant I could use the exact same code and set up to test out timing, names, and other design elements and quickly render the video out at a smaller scale. The same exact quick-render file was easily used to create the production ready video, by simply increasing the scale factor.
Scenes were broken down into rows of sub-clips. For each sub-clip you would pull in the global settings, have a title, name, set the duration, select a layout type (either "left_right" or "centered"). Then each sub-clips gets stacked together to create the scene. At the end of the script, all of the scenes simply get stitched together one after the other.
I also worked with Judy to make selects for images from the film that could work for the poster art. I used python to export every frame from a time stamp range that I specified. This effectively gave me contact sheets from which I could precisely select the exact moment in the film that would have the strongest visual impact.
