Skip to main content

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!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Crab Pot

For the next step of the modelling process of the crab pot, I was challenged with another huge hurdle ( to say the least). This stage was where all the painstaking problems crawled in again.  The rope. I thought making some bendy cords would be simple enough, but believe me, it was anything but. There aren't many tutorials, covering the whole modelling process to the end 'game ready' product, for rope. So, like previous obstacles I faced in the modelling stage, I used multiple methods and trial and error to find the best path.  Actually, creating a tube following a manually placed path, was the easiest part for me. I had picked this step up while at University. However, I had to manually place and move each Bezier path to form the guide lines, for yards of rope, in a natural and realistic way. Hundreds of them. I spent more hours than I would have liked, setting up the paths to guide the rope along. I kept asking myself that there must be an easier way to tie...
Post a Comment
Read more

Render Tests

An important element in the conceptual stage is to not look at a problem from one perspective. It's always best to get multiple views to achieve a greater outcome. To reach an end goal is one thing. The journey to that end goal is something else entirely. One of my favourite quotes by Carl Friedrich Gauss states "It is not knowledge, but the act of learning, not possession but the act of getting there, which grants the greatest enjoyment". I totally agree with this and it applies to game development. Creating something big or small brings its challenges and the act to reach the finish line is where the magic happens. I hope to experiment in several styles, as would any other artist working early on in game development; focusing on diversity and demonstrating imagination. Jason Bartlett © I created the above image, of a  bow mast, using the toon shader in the render settings of Arnold for Maya. I really enjoyed creating the style, was simple to se...
Post a Comment
Read more

New Project

Hello! Sometime while at University, studying Computer Games Arts, I had a vision for a video game. This idea, from 2015, would turn out to become a passion project where I mused, jotted and doodled on the sidelines of studying.  It wasn't for a further three years until I decided to actually put pen to paper (or pen to tablet in my case) and bring my idea to life.  As the quote goes, "A dream is just a dream until you decide to make it real" or "All our dreams can come true, if we have the courage to pursue them". So in Autumn 2018, I did just that. Pursued my dreams. Now I wouldn't attempt to make a whole game all by myself. That would be silly and take literally years!  I lulled over the notion of asking fellow  graduates and  freelance artists  to aid in bringing my vision to life. This would be great but several factors including money and time played on my mind...alot. Then a marvell...
Post a Comment
Read more