This piece was my second year in a row working on the MassArt Film/Video All School Show opening titles. If you’d like to read about 2023, or more about MassArt’s All School Show in general, you can find that in a blog post here. The most important thing to know about this screening from that previous post is that we accept every piece. There’s no common genre, theme, tone, or length, so its really vital to create visuals that are really impartial.

This piece owes a lot to the work of an illustrator I have loved for years- James Turner. It owes so much, in fact, that were this not student work I would doubtless get in trouble for aping his visual style so completely. Turner is known mostly for his work with the Pokemon Company, and for Co-Directing the 2024 game The Plucky Squire. His work is often characterized by cartoonish proportions and thick outlines that have these small breaks in them.

The inspiration his work had on this piece should be obvious. I’ve been told recreating what you love is a good way to learn, and I think that was true with this piece.

Every letter and accent shapes in this clip is two shape layers. The bottom layer is the fill color of the letter and drives the 3D extrude animation. The top layer is just the outline, which had to be fine tuned by hand for every letter, sometimes twice in the case of the letter “o” or a capital “a.” This was a hugely time consuming process (which my partner will tell you that all great art is).

The rest of the animation came somewhat smoothly. It’s all 3D camera work, which I’m fairly experienced with. A lot of time was put into fine tuning the locations of the transforming accent shapes so they would hit the right marks and move with a little bit of parallax but ultimately not be distracting from the information I was trying to convey. At the end, those large shapes acted as a wipe to the interstitial title card for the first piece of the show.

This is one of my favorite title design pieces I’ve done. It’s easy to create something interesting when you’re copying something that’s already very good. But I think having such a strong visual foundation pushed me to extend the time spent fine tuning the motion, and I feel that work is apparent in the final piece.