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Exit Entertainment Title Animation

B

ack in 2012, I created a project that required me to make a fictitious production company.


I named my made-up company Exit Entertainment and even created a title animation for it. I soon went on to reuse this again and again, for my own short films and comedy sketch outros while at college (see here).

Over the past decade, I've created several different iterations of the Exit Entertainment title animation. Going into this project, I thought it would be a great time to update and overhaul the whole look of the sequence to include it in the game's opening titles!

Since D_ROGUE is set in the late 70's, I thought what better way than to create it in the style of what an exit sign might have looked like from that era. Although, a vast majority of them in the past just said EXIT, so I mostly just changed the two-tone colour palette.

Getting started, I had to dig out the old files which needed to be cleaned up and vectorised. Ten years ago, I had only just started to discover what vectors and lossless files were and so the project was all done in pixels. That's right. Lots of yucky aliasing! Though I had to completely recreate all the elements of the titles in Illustrator, I was still able to use the originals as reference.

Something I knew would definitely need to be updated was the titles font. The last font I had used was called Haettenschweiler (I know, that's quite a mouthful). So, I had to have a hunt for something clean and easy to read. Eventually, I found a Helvetica variant (very close to what they actually use for emergency exit signs) and then just played with the lettering and casing till it looked right.

Once I had completed all the elements, I brought them into After Effects to create a simple but effective position keyframe animation.

In all the previous versions of the titles, I included a rather striking female scream for the guy bolting for the exit. As well as this, various other overused sound effects. 

This time around, I took a totally different approach...no sound at all! As the other opening titles for D_ROGUE (the game engine and software used) will be soundless, it just felt right.

Sometimes, less is often more.

Here's a screenshot in After Effects of the completed animation and the keyframes on the timeline. I was able to create the entire thing in under half an hour.


Jason Bartlett ©

Below is the complete Exit Entertainment logo. Hope you like it as much as I had fun making it!

 

Jason Bartlett ©


Thanks for reading :)


P.S. As always, I have left a couple of easter eggs (well technically one and half if you're going to be picky) in there!

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