Making the opening titles for LOL

Step one: take loads of photos of the cast on set in myspace poses.

Step two: Paper.

Step three: Ink.

With LOL being released as an online drama series, I wanted each webisode to have a title sequence. Thankfully, during production, I had John and Jeremy take as many photos of the cast as possible. The original plan was just to use these stills as character Facebook/Myspace pages – but the shots came in handy when putting together the title sequence.

I did the original design as a Photoshop file, doing deliberately-crappy cutouts from the Facebook shots and pasting them all into a big document. I found a great font called ‘green pillow’ which spells out the character names, as well as some ink splat brushes from deviantart (see below).

This PSD was then imported into After Effects, I moved the layers around a bit in 3d, to give the sequence some depth, and got the camera to move along in time with the theme tune.

Having used stills of the characters instead of live action, the whole thing felt pretty static so I decided I wanted real life video ink splats. Looking around the net, I couldn’t find any footage of ink splats for free so decided to shoot some of my own.

Covering the floor with white paper, I setup a camera on sticks tilted down and dripped a few drops of plain black pen ink. (Note to self: next time wear gloves. It’s permanent.)
Brought the footage into After Effects, used it to mask matt colours and job done.

Final Result:

[RAW] [/RAW]