For this personal project, I created the title credits sequence for a fictitious movie called Spooktober: Resurrection. This was heavily inspired by the credits for The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The general direction for the project sought to emulate the look and feel of the opening sequence for a 1970s horror movie.

To create the different backgrounds for each shot, I photographed various random images, which were then heavily distorted and warped in Adobe Photoshop.

The text was created separately to avoid unnecessary interactions with the background, as it had its own set of effects.

The backgrounds were then exported to Adobe After Effects, where they received several distinct animations.

Each background was animated in a different way. All received unique distortion and animation layers, creating a subtle moving and writhing effect. An exposure flicker and slight focus/defocus animation was also applied.

The backgrounds were then combined with the on-screen text, and the combined shot received a final effects pass, which included film grain and a dust simulation.

A characteristic of vintage film titles was film weave, an occurrence where text composited over a background would appear to jiggle or weave slightly. This was due to both physical flaws in the filming process, and an absence of pin registration, which would hold the film steadily in place. To recreate this, a slight wiggle animation was applied to both text and background individually. The text subtly moves on the x axis only, while the background jitters on both axis.

After exporting, all the shots were imported into Adobe Premiere Pro. The soundtrack and sound effects were recorded on an iPhone and edited in Adobe Audition (with the exception of the static, provided by Freesound). All visual and sound elements were combined and edited in Premiere Pro, creating seven final shots.