spring...the making of...

TITLE SEQUENCE

Ok for the title sequence I knew two things...I wanted to show some colorful flower growing, and I wanted to have the word "Spring" be written in Thai and then have the subtitle come up below it.

First I did a test on the beach, which really didn't work that well...I thought I could plant the stem of a flower in the sand and then just pick the pedals off until it was down to the stem...and then kind of bury the stem in the sand.  The idea was to play this backwards and make it look like the flower was growing out of the sand.  This didn't work that well...the smallest amount of wind made all the tiny pedals and leaves move way to much, and the sand wasn't solid enough to hold it....soooo I figured I would have to do it indoors and use a window to blow out the background to make it look like it was outside...

I put this off until the very last day, and ended up doing it in a hotel in Bangkok, while waiting for our flight home.  I cruised around with a small guitar, which I gaff taped to a small stool that was in the room.  I put this in front of the window and then taped the curtains to either wall so there wasn't any shadows in my background...it wasn't perfect, but i thought it looked kind of cool.

Once my silly little set was built, I went around the parking lot looking for flowers while my girlfriend was chilling at the pool....I'm pretty sure she thought I was crazy at this point, but what are ya gonna do?...I ended up finding some sweet plumeria's nearby and broke off a few branches...I picked the nicest one and taped it tightly to the guitar head.  I actually had to go back and tape more leaves behind it, because the yellow flowers got lost in the background without it...

So then once it was taped up, I found my shot and locked off my tripod.

Then I basically just took a pair of scissors and chopped away at everything one frame at a time...a good ole fashioned hair cut.

This took about an hour or so, because I had to trim every pedal plus the leaves...kind of tedius...

This left me with a quick timelapse of my flowers disappearing until the screen was left with just the background.  I then played the sequence backwards and got my own crappy version of a Planet Earth timelapse...haha

I then asked my girlfriend to hand write the title in Thai...she is an amazing artist so she did it pretty quickly.  It was translated already, so she just copied it in her own way.  Once she finished, I took a picture of it:

Then brought it in to Motion and took away the background and was good to go....and that's basically it.