When I was picking out assignments, I was drawn to both the Opening Credits assignment and the Kinetic Typography assignment.  I had some audio issues while working on the kinetic typography piece, and some indecision in picking a movie’s opening credits, and on top of all that some determination to figure out at least a little bit of animation in After Effects. So somehow both of these assignments got kind of combined, and I redid the opening credits for Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove.

The film is a black comedy playing off Cold War tensions. I think the opening and closing sequences are pretty genius — the tension of dark, apocalyptic subject matter treated humorously comes across really well in the pretty, lilting kind of music Kubrick uses as the backdrop for war planes and explosions.

These are the original opening credits:

And this is the end sequence:

I decided to keep the music from the original opening, and blend the imagery of both of the clips together. I used this bomb, this airplane, and this explosion from The Noun Project, added a paper texture, and changed the colors of each. I love the handwritten credits of the original, and found a font that was pretty close.  In After Effects, I imported the original trailer and then turned the video portion off so that only the sound remained.  I made separate sets of layers for each bit of text or each image that I wanted to animate.  Animation is a TON of work for even pretty simple/slow results like this, in case you were wondering.  It’s way more difficult for me to explain the process of these more complicated assignments with words alone, so I might knock out another tutorial for this one.

Anyway, here is the end result: