The Art of the Title Sequence
Titles Matter
The Idea
"Each of the scenes in our sequence represents one of the seven chemical processes used when creating gold: Calcination, Dissolution, Separation, Conjunction, Fermentation, Distillation, Coagulation. We researched the ancient history of alchemy and tried to be as accurate as possible in our portrayal of this mythical art form."
Akira Thompson (Co-Director)
"There's all this secret symbolism, sacred geometry, and ritual. It is this mysterious sect of people who know how to speak their own language. As designers, we use this seemingly arcane software and computer code and for someone who doesn't do this work, it probably just looks like a bunch of nonsense, but we are able to communicate with each other in this unique way."
Akira Thompson
The Production Process
The Tech
"We were able to easily add extra detail to our environments using procedural displacement maps with Redshift (and could) experiment creatively by modifying lights, shaders, and geometry, thanks to the quick feedback when using progressive rendering."
Dan Solomon
"As we do not have a render management system for Redshift at the moment, we were able to come up with a way to efficiently render multiple scenes overnight using 8 machines, each with a single NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 graphics card. Using Redshift's 'Skip Existing Frames' feature, we could queue up multiple shots to render in a batch file and have each machine working to finish the renders by the next morning. The more complex scenes, which contain many overlapping reflective and refractive surfaces, had a frame render time of less than 30 minutes in most cases. Some of the wider landscape shots had frame render times as low as 1 minute."
The Next Step
Director | Akira Thompson, Dan Solomon