Trapcode Form Text Animation – “Becoming a Legend”

[Carl Larsen]

Part of the reason the titles looked so organic in “legend” is that we comped in a lot real elements into the shot – you won’t get that look using plug-ins alone. Cody Redmer, the lead compositor, used form to break up the title, but the smoke and sparks and distortion maps were driven by real elements we shot in the studio.

…by the way, we had a lot of fun capturing the live footage for the titles. In the end, we found burning the individual pages of a phone book with a hard back light gave us the look we were after.

Carl Larsen

TelescopeMediaGroup.net

[Viacheslav Sasykin]

Didn’t have time to read full article (but I definitely will, I really like everything what Carl Larsen does, how could I miss this article?) just watched final video clip. What I can say that the intro title – it is definitely Form.
Go to this page:
https://www.trapcode.com/products_form.html
and find there movie sample and project file for “Text to Sand”. Feel free to dismantle and analyze project, everything is quite simple. What you see in Carl’s video it’s the same but in reverse, let’s say, Sand to Text.
After text has assembled from the “sand” it’s noticeable that displacement was used and for that you may want to watch Eran Stern’s tutorial Smoking Letters in AE CS3 here:
https://library.creativecow.net/articles/stern_eran/The_Smoke.php
The smoke by itself and particles could be done in Particular or may be it was stock footage (Particular in good hands can work magic).
In my opinion there is a very little that Form can do and Particular can not (honestly, right now only 3D displacement comes on my mind) so…

[Viacheslav Sasykin]

Funny… kept this page open and answered after a while and had no idea that Carl answered by himself first. Hi, Carl! Glad I was right in some of my guesses.

[Cody Redmer]

Hi Chris,

This is Cody Redmer (director and designer of Becoming a Legend). Yes, Trapcode Form worked perfect, it is well worth the purchase, I used it, and some real cigar smoke, to create the text smoking in. The only other tip I would give you is to have motion blur on, and crank the shutter angle.

Also, check out Trapcode’s Form tutorials, they’re a good start!

Hope that helps.

Cody

[Chris Arnold]

Hi, thanks guys for the posts. I tried to the trial of Form in addition with Particular and I like what I am getting. I can see also how using real smoke can be nice to use as a displacement. Thanks for the tips and great job Carl and Cody with “Becoming a Legend”. It’s a beautiful peace, and very impressive to be pulled off in the short time you had.

Chris