Monday, February 14, 2011

Dark Allies Title Sequence

Almost twenty years ago, I took a month long alpine mountaineering class in the Sangre de Cristo mountains of southern Colorado through Outward Bound, which had two lasting impacts on my life. The first was to ignite a love of climbing which has lasted on and off to this day. The second was a friendship with one of my classmates, the only one I've kept up with, a Bay Area native by the name of Tilden Moschetti. Tilden is probably one of the most interesting and curious people I've known. In high school, his foreign language of choice was not French or Spanish, but rather Middle English. Upon graduating, Tilden obtained a law degree (if you're in San Francisco and you need a good divorce lawyer - and I hope you don't, but if you do - Tilden is your man). In subsequent years, Tilden has made his way through a number of pursuits which have included sailing, cycling, carbon fiber fabrication and, most recently, filmmaking. His current project is a short film about vampires and divinity students called Dark Allies, which he'll be submitting to this year's ComicCon (along with a number of other festivals), and he tapped me to do illustrations for the title sequence, which I've just finished. Tilden is in the process of post-production, which includes animating the various layers of my Photoshop files in After Effects to achieve a 2.5D effect. Here's what I gave him:

This is my version of the movie title slide. I'm not sure if this will make it into the movie, as Tilden has been working on his own background...


The rest of these images, however, will be in the title sequence. Here's the female lead, Katrina Sherwood, playing the role of Crystal:


And here we have the male lead, Tony Sommers, playing Duane:


Here are the Writer/Director and DP credits:


And Line Producer and my credit (who knows, you may soon be able to look me up on IMDB and actually find me!):


The final shot of the film, after the credit roll at the end:


Tilden was originally looking for a "graphic novel" look, and what I came up with sort of hit that mark, but has a little more of an interpolated rotoscoped feel (if you don't know what that is, rent Waking Life or A Scanner Darkly sometime). But we're both pretty happy with it. I look forward to seeing these images animated, and of course, seeing the film itself.