Titles and Content
The Genius of Photography
The brief was to design titles and content. The title sequence serves a specific role which is to announce the name of the programme to follow. It should also set the mood and the pace for the viewer and give an idea of what the programme is about. I started looking at the type of programme that I would like to work with as the brief gave me the opportunity to do this. Early on I decided to I wanted to do titles and content for a documentary type programme. My initial thoughts were Dan Cruickshank’s style documentaries, the most recent being a series on architecture. I decided to redo the titles and content for The Genius of Photography as I am quite passionate about photography. This would also give me the opportunity to work experimentally. I wanted to create an engaging sequence that would appeal to photographers as my demographic; a specialist programme for professional photographers.
I wanted to make the content engaging as well as innovative so I looked beyond what had been done in the past. My solution was to put a twist on the green screen technique. I spray painted an old camera green to use it for keying, as it would be a way to show moving image on the camera whilst still having the original footage of a photographer looking at his camera settings such as the aperture, depth of field and so on. The keying technique was achieved by using Adobe After Effects, Keylight, which is used in the industry.
The moving image would link to the content of each section of the programme. It would act as an introduction to each scene in a programme so if the programme section was about aperture then the moving image would be about aperture. I felt this type of content would be more worthy than just a break bumper, it would have a purpose. I took multiple takes of the ‘green’ camera and different shots, medium and close up, so that it covered numerous aspects of the programme.
For the main title sequence I toyed with two ideas; I ended up using both! One was diagrammatic, using illustrations turned into Vectors showing different photographic techniques. This was limited because my ‘focus’ was all on the film development process. I still feel that this worked because The Genius of Photography programme is about classic images and photographers who up until very recently used analogue film techniques as opposed to digital. Many photographers still prefer to use film stock. My second idea was to use layered photography prints that pan slightly and could also be changed very quickly, almost being content in their own right, before we see the final logo reveal itself.
I am very satisfied with the result as I took a huge risk for the contents section but it paid off. I learned how to use Keylight to its full potential. The only fault I found was the green spray that I used wasn’t as green as it could have been for the perfect key. I achieved the effect I wanted in the end but it was just a little more work.