Quick Design Tips: HBO’s True Detective Titles Sequence After Effects Tutorial

HBO’s True Detective Title Squence are pretty awesome and many designers just loved them.  These titles are more or less transnational production as the project was produced by Jennifer Sofio Hall at Elastic and directed by Patrick Clair in Antibody studio.  The team at Antibody in Sydney, led by Senior Designer Raoul Marks and with compositing and animation support from the great guys at Breeder studio which is based in Brisbane, completed the design and animation phase.

Here are the thoughts of Patrick Clair about the project:

When we were initially briefed, Nic Pizzolatta, the showrunner, and Cary Fukunaga, the director, spoke a lot about how the landscape and setting of the show revealed the characters and reflected their internal struggles. The show is set in Louisiana in the ’90s, with a strong presence of the petrochemical infrastructure and the pollution of the physical landscape. We read scripts for the first three episodes before even considering the visual execution. Story is always the most fundamental part of our design process, so it was great getting a good understanding of the writing before we began to explore visual ideas.

Visually, we were inspired by photographic double exposures. Fragmented portraits, created by using human figures as windows into partial landscapes, served as a great way to show characters that are marginalised or internally divided. It made sense for the titles to feature portraits of the lead characters built out the place they lived. This became a graphic way of doing what the show does in the drama: reveal character through location.

If you want to see the whole info about the project, pitch materials and details, you can visit http://www.artofthetitle.com/title/true-detective/

Here is the original titles: