The Brink

Young Ones ADC Merit Award Winner

Title Sequence

BRIEF

Develop a title sequence for a documentary about abstraction, using only design that is caught–in-camera.

ROLE

Cinematographer, Colorist, Editor, Designer, Audio Mixing

SOFTWARE

After Effects
Premiere Pro

YEAR

2024

The careful balance between believability and ambiguity is crucial to achieving abstraction. Creating The Brink served as a roughly two-month-long exercise in discovering this for myself. This title sequence boils down the struggle between an unstoppable force and an immovable object down to its purest conflicting features: dark vs. light, sharp vs. dull, massive vs. narrow, one vs. many.

PRE-VISUALIZATION

From the very beginning of the project, the theme of conflict guided every decision as I created the title sequence. The graphic above highlights the particular conflict verbs I decided early on that must be included in the final edit: jab, twist, slice, pierce. I hadn't realized yet, but choosing latex and needles as the materials to represent this clash would prove to be a challenge when it came time to manipulating them for specific shots. In that sense, conflict was built into the process by virtue of my own struggle to stretch tough rubber while trying to avoid pricking my fingers.

Superiority vs. Inferiority

What followed the story development was extensive experimentation with composition, shown in the look development panel above, in which I always looked for opportunities to represent superiority vs. inferiority between the two main actors. This manifested itself in dominating patterns, large blocks of value, or interruptions in otherwise stable placements of objects.

Victim Design

Positive & negative, high contrast, rubber/latex texture, rounded form

Antagonist Design

Organized chaos, unity, reflective texture, angular forms

The Push &
the Pull

Finally, the footage was processed in After Effects, where I crushed the values to emphasize the conflict theme through value contrast. A grain filter was also applied to represent constant disruption, as if the pixels of the video themselves were actively pushing and pulling at each other. The result is a sequence that conveys a battle, representing the idea of the balance in abstraction as a harsh, uncomfortable process: tension.

SKETCH AND TOON

Escalating the
tension...

Forming the story beats at the very beginning allowed for me to build out the sequence efficiently, now paying close attention to the pacing. Part of my thought process at this point was figuring out how to engineer multiple stages of the prolonging of release. This prolonging came in the form of three stages throughout the story: first meeting, first contact, and final strike.

SKETCH AND TOON

STYLE FRAMES

CREDIT

Brianna M Haggerty

Cinematographer, Colorist, Editor, Designer, Audio Mixing

Universal Production Music

Kelly Warner

Song track

Sound design consultation