The brief
An opening title sequence for an anime show that does not exist, in the look of late 90s TV anime. Two rivals, GOLD and PEARL, too proud to quit each other, cut to every beat of a song called EGO.
Nobody hired us for it. It is a concept piece made to show what a small team can do with a song and a story, and it had to work on a TV and on a phone.
What we made
- EGO, a 92 second opening at 1920 x 1080 and 24 frames a second
- A vertical 1080 x 1920 cut for phones, rebuilt from scratch rather than cropped
- Model sheets for GOLD and PEARL plus a lineup, used as the reference for every frame
- Painted stills set up as cels over separate painted backgrounds
- Ten short clips for the few moments a still could not carry
How it works
Most of the opening is still artwork moved by code. Python and FFmpeg drive the camera moves, holds, wipes and title cards, and every cut is placed on a beat of the song. Characters change drawing at 12 a second, the way old TV anime was shot, so the motion feels hand made instead of smooth.
The model sheets keep both leads on model from shot to shot. The ten clips were rendered small first, checked, and only then made at full size.
What we threw away
We tried animating the characters from sprite sheets. Every frame came back slightly redrawn, so the faces shimmered, and those frames now only appear as silhouettes and quick snaps.
The first vertical cut panned across the wide frames and did not hold attention. It was rebuilt as stacked two-shots with hard cuts. A stray lock of hair on PEARL was fixed in the finals.
Limits
This is concept work. The show, GOLD and PEARL are made up, so there are no client numbers to report.
The short clips were made at 720p and scaled up, so they are a little softer than the title type around them.
