okay so you just got a netflix deal but you blew all your budget on catering and now
you only have 10 minutes to make a title sequence for your true crime documentary
well you've come to the right place
I love title sequences even if they are just extreme close-ups of barely thematically relevant
3d objects rotating slowly for 60 seconds too long in this video i want to show you a whole bunch of
techniques that you can use in after effects to mimic the look you see so often particularly in
crime documentaries but also add a nice bit of production value to basic scenes and you
can download this project file for free down in the description just without the stock footage
so we're going to start in an empty composition and start by creating a new solid with ctrl y
and let's make it a light gray color now let's create a vignette now there is a vignette effect
over in effects and presets but you're going to have more options if you create one yourself first
by starting with another new solid let's make this one black and then select our ellipse tool up here
in the toolbar and double click it that will make a mask the size of your comp we want to set it
from add to subtract press f on our keyboard to bring up its feather and then feather the heck
out of it about 750 feels nice then if you double click that mask you can adjust it to get the look
you want then the text so let's select our type tool and click in our composition and type our
title and then click our align panel and align it to the center and then we want to pick a font
nothing too fancy you want it to be nice and mild for a general audience franklin gothic is
a beautiful typeface that is very welcoming and is also available at adobe fonts and now we want to
increase that tracking which is the space between all of the characters if we go from 0 to 100 that
space is doubled but that is far too subtle we're making a serious title so we need to go
all the way up to at least 600 more than you think is reasonable is just about right and
now we're going to animate the tracking to be even wider so now let's hold ctrl and click the
arrow just to the left of our layer down here and next to animate we want to click the arrow here
and add a tracking property let's keyframe the tracking amount at the start and then about five
seconds in let's increase that by 40 so now it starts really wide and slowly gets even wider
very dramatic yet somehow tasteful and i think we do want to have about one second before our
title appears on screen so we can add some nice footage so let's drag this layer over
one second and let's trim the end of our comp to about five seconds as well five seconds i think
is the perfect amount of time for title sequence anything else is far too indulgent now let's add
some texture now i've got this scanned image of some painted paper that i use
all the time and that is included in the project file too so let's drag that into our main comp
set its blending mode to screen so we can see through the dark areas and then let's add a curves
effect to adjust the contrast there we go and let's animate the scale let's have it end at 100 percent
and then at the start take it down a little bit maybe to 85. there that adds a bit of depth and
a bit of grunge just so the audience knows what's coming in the show will be pretty grim and dark
this is not a nice sleek white collar crime that the show is portraying this is one of
the bad crimes. so to add more depth we're going to duplicate this layer with ctrl or command d
and we're going to add parallax by increasing the scale of this one faster so let's select both of
these keyframes let's go to the start and increase the scale amount so it starts at about 140 percent
and then at the end let's increase this one two maybe a bit more maybe a touch over
200. so now i've got two layers of texture and the top one is larger and getting larger faster
so it's got more parallax and appears to be a bit closer to us much more depth and let's also rotate
it a bit so it doesn't match up exactly with the one below it and we can maybe add a gaussian blur
effect to this one too maybe two pixels just a little bit so it feels a tiny bit out of focus
and maybe increase that contrast a little bit more and now we're going to add our secret weapon
but first a quick word about this video sponsor Milanote. Milanote is a web app a brilliant
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up required to view for this project i did a lot of research to find the familiar elements that
a lot of these title sequences had i took the best parts the most interesting title sequences
and the most common elements from the more generic ones i kept a growing list of what elements i'd
need to include i decided what color palette i was after and even how i wanted it to sound grime
so when I was ready to start animating this project i already knew all the elements I
needed and the animation went as smooth as butter Milanote have also generously offered to give
away a full year of their pro subscription to three viewers who sign up using the link
down in the description and now we're going to add our secret weapon light leaks if you search on any
stock website you are going to find loads of these even on youtube you're going to find heaps that
you can use i found this one which has a bit of a flickering film look which will be nice and grungy
so let's drag that over the top of everything and set its blending mode to screen there how good
does that look with barely any effort at all now it's a bit too intense for the whole scene though
so we're gonna need to fade it out but we do want it to be pretty bright for when our title appears
here so we can kind of smooth that transition so let's drag this across until we find a place
where it's pretty bright here seems pretty good so now let's keyframe its opacity let's start at 100
at around the one second mark and around two seconds let's lower that to about 10. now we're
not lowering it to zero so now we get just a tiny subtle bit of flickering which i think helps and
let's easy ease those keyframes with f9 and then for the last second let's increase the opacity as
well so we get more flicker at the very end there that is looking lovely and grisly and for our
title popping on let's just animate its opacity fading up as well so it is a little more of a
smooth transition and easy use those keyframes as well there that feels nice now let's add some
footage to our sequence i really want this imagery to be specific to this tv series so it shouldn't
feel too familiar or generic so i went to a stock site that i'm subscribed to and search the word
crime we've got someone walking very slowly with a car behind them could this person be the victim
the criminal perhaps this stock videographer's most compliant friend i'll leave that up to you i
also found this footage of someone poorly cleaning a window which while technically is not a crime
it isn't a very productive use of their time at all and then this sequence of fingerprints which
actually does look pretty cool so i have imported those into after effects and let's
place the fingerprint behind our text and behind that vignette as well and let's start that as
soon as our title comes on now let's set that blending mode to screen so we just see the white
of the fingerprint and it's animating pretty fast so let's right click and choose time time stretch
and let's change the stretch factor from 100 to 400. so that will stretch it out 400 percent
so it plays back at 25 percent of the speed there much less painful to look at now at the very start
let's add our walking scene and let's slide that more over towards the right and then we
want to add the invert effect so it is much more mysterious and chilling and then let's add a hue
and saturation effect as well and just bring down the saturation there and let's set the blending
mode to multiply so we just see the dark areas and now let's trim it to end one second behind this
light leak and let's animate its opacity reducing for its last few frames as well and of course
easy ease loads there we go now let's drag in our inept window cleaner slide them over to the left
and let's add the same effects and set to multiply as well maybe we don't desaturate this one quite
as much and let's change the hue so it fits our background a little bit more so our title
sequence is now looking pretty close we just need to add some final effects to bring it all together
so let's select our top layer and then go up to layer new adjustment layer to create a new
adjustment layer over the top of everything and call that effects because we always label
our layers and we're going to add a subtle color grade to this by adding the curves effect let's
change the red channel and bump up the reds in the shadows a little bit and take down the blue in the
highlights to give it a nice subtle sepia tone and sepia is that slightly brown tint that the past
tended to happen in and then we can add our blur and we're gonna add the best blur that money can
buy that also comes in after effects and that is camera lens blur but be warned this will slow down
after effects a lot this is a very render heavy effect but our series deserves the best so let's
start really blurry at a five pixel blur radius and let's keyframe that decreasing from one second
and to maybe three seconds and let's go down to a 2 pixel blur radius now i do like to keep it a
bit blurred so it does help soften the whole image and it doesn't feel so sharp and digital but that
is up to you but you do want to make sure you have repeat edge pixels selected so we don't get these
pale halos at the very edge of our frame right here like they did from levy get unchecked in the
walking dead titles for season one and let's easy ease those keyframes and let's have it blur back
up at the very end as well there i love that blur effect and it doesn't bother me too much that the
first second is almost completely blurred out maybe that adds some mystery and is thematic
to the series because the case is so out of focus with leads that go nowhere for at least the first
seven episodes as is the focus of those directing and editing the series that have to pad 20 minutes
of content out to 10 55 plus minute episodes otherwise their netflix checks weren't clear
season two of making a murderer was much longer than season one and bugger all happened except for
this woman buying a used car and then we are going to add a final effect which is noise and i think
about a six percent noise is nice but i do have a soft spot for noise and of course you can tweak
all of these settings to dial in the look that you want as long as you don't make it too original and
there you have it a crime documentary title sequence in no time at all and of course you
can grab this project file for free down in the description to take a deeper dive and have a
closer look at all the effects i could not provide the stock footage but why not film some yourself
if you'd like to learn animation and motion design techniques i've got a playlist of some
of the best tutorials on this channel for you to take a look at i'll see you in the next one