Title Design

Shiros Journey

Escaping from a terrible disaster unscathedly is a miracle.
What stays are survivor's guilt and memories of a life before the storm.

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1 - Casefilm

2 - Subject

Our briefing was to do a title design for a fictitious movie based on a Tiny Tale that goes as follows:

Shiro hated his boss. What a pointless job trip. Angrily, he looked down at his train ticket: Hiroshima – Osaka. 8.5.1945

spaceaero2 / CC BY (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)

3 - Transfer

From the date given, we can assume that Shiro got away from the terrible bombing of Hiroshima by going on a job trip he didn't want to attend in the first place. 

I decided to focus on what he could have had to leave behind. Maybe his family. Maybe a wife and a young child. Maybe they tried to escape, but couldn't. Also all of his material possesions. Inevitably lost.

4 - Concept & Realization

I decided to address the calm before the storm. Left in a hurry, the room seems - somehow painfully - quiet. 

When the bomb hits, the room is destroyed by the shockwave, which is represented by it getting darker and eventually being struck by a saturated red gradient. 

The image is distorted as a metaphor for the radiation the wave brings.

The title song is a traditional japanese piece mothers sing to their kids to calm them down in hard times.

6 - Technical Aspects

I built and shaded the room in Maya, rendered via Redshift and used a gradient multiplied with a Z-Pass to achieve the shockwave effect. The distortion was a mix of turbulent displacement and AE Pixel Sorter 2. 

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