Sometime mid to late 2019 my friend Fanki Cambeletta reached out to me asking if I'd be interested in creating a title sequence for his upcoming documentary (Lemp's Last Wright). Seeing as I am always looking for opportunities to get more main titles within my portfolio I jumped at the opportunity. This had been a work in progress for the last five years for Franki, so I wanted to make sure I did all of his hard work justice by supplying him with a title sequence he'd be proud to include within his film.

Although we began talks almost 6 months in advance, my schedule throughout the end of 2019 and beginning 2020 was absolutely bonkers. I had initially done some style frame exploration and simply put, nothing was REALLY working for me. I tossed around and explored several ideas, unfortunately nothing really stuck out as the "right" idea until it became uncomfortably close to crunch-time on the delivery date. With the premiere date about a month out, I knew I had to stomp on the gas pedal with this project. I began devoting significant amounts of my "off-time" to the project. I've got to tell you, creative and technical decisions seem to become a whole lot easier when a deadline is looming up ahead. Franki and I re-grouped and we ran through a list of questions to help me hone in on content. 

From that second initial brainstorm Franki and I had, we began to lay out a list of visual possibilities which would hint to the story which would follow these titles. 

Given this was a passion/personal project, I really wanted to take the opportunity to learn some new skills, so I began thinking of ways to work in some ideas on how to use Marvelous designer for specific outfits to represent characters as well as opportunities to work in VDB's with TFD inside of Cinema. Unfortunately, scheduling ended up pushing these ideas out the door and I drastically reduced the scope of the piece so I could bring this minute long piece to life over the course of TWO WEEKS. Had it not been for the extensive pains and trials of Unabridged (which I had JUST released before diving into the bulk of this work) there would have been no way I could have turned this project around on time.

With a simplified story in place and a solid game plan to move forward, I reached out to my good friend Jake Vardaman, who's a super talented Motion Designer + 3D artist. He came through with flying colors, taking some of the technical workload off my plate for the physically based section of the pearl necklace breaking apart. He exported out an alembic file for me to bring back into Cinema for lighting, texturing and time re-mapping. Within half a day or so of work we had ourselves a relatively simple yet, very effective shot to add to the bin.

Other than a single issue of getting the physics on the billiard balls to break how I wanted, this project went off without a hitch. Franki was very generous with his direction and Jake was a blast to work with on his section. It was extremely gratifying to see how much more efficient I'd become with the whole process of working with Redshift in comparison to my trials with Unabridged. I kept a simple game plan and stuck to it, resulting in what I think turned out to be an elegant solution with a rather short turnaround. For that, I'm thankful for the opportunity and proud of the result.