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1970s Optical title pipeline
I’m trying to mimic the look of 70s/80s title animation for a project but I’m seriously aiming to honor as much the classic production methods as possible rather than just slap film grain and call it a day. Over the years, I’ve read accounts from veterans on how it was usually produced, but didn’t really think too far ahead and keep records of it for myself.
The one thing I do know is that back in the day, each individual element was a dedicated piece of film with the finest grain and next-to-no gate weave that would eventually be combined in the optical printer. I’m probably missing a few steps, so I was wondering if there’s anyone who can help.
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3 Replies
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Honestly, you can’t avoid gate weave and you can’t avoid grain if you’re doing things optically, so just decide how high of a budget your project is supposed to have and go for it. (Higher budget = less grain and less gate weave.)
This is 80’s-themed, but it has a lot of good insight into the workflow (and links to full tutorials) on how the Stranger Things titles were done: https://maxonvfx.com/4vLAtNq
I made this piece for Maxon with optical concepts in mind. Even though I used modern tools like 3D Stroke from Red Giant, things are off-center, there are artifacts from the scraping process, and more little imperfections to hint at the analog-ness of the era. (Though, I did cheat and pick a stylized color for the fading of the titles instead of an optically accurate one.) Unfortunately, some of my work really gets lost in the re-encoding that social media platforms use.
On that piece, I made it thinking about how they would have made the original piece. A tinted piece of plastic with black coating scraped off. So, I made the initial design with some brush imperfections, set it ever so slight off center, and set it spinning with some motion blur. Then, I exposed the titles over top of it (with a slightly different gate weave).
But, seriously, my little thing is nothing compared to the love that went into the Stranger Things titles. Highly recommend watching everything linked from the article on the Making Of.
maxonvfx.com
Animating the Stranger Things Title Sequence
Eric Demeusy shares how he used Red Giant Shine to create the Emmy-winning titles for one of the most popular shows on Netflix.
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Hey bro!
Here’s a 100% guaranteed method:
– Physically print every frame on paper at 12fps
Wrap each sheet and unwrap it, then Wear dirty boots and step on each sheet without destroying it
Scan each sheet at 1200dpi
Merge the files back as image sequence
Remove background , post,
That’s it
The truth is that ai now is perfectly able to recreate that look completely in the book, but it requires training a custom look model trained in real worn film artifacts, almost nobody knows how to do this (except me? lol just kidding)
Hope that helps, Good luck!
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I remember when Vox covered you guys and your process when Stranger Things first popped off. It was an eye-opener!
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