Harry Potter Opening Titles Effects help

How do you think I could go about doing this effect:

http://vimeo.com/406420

The first 36 seconds I mean with the opening title and all. I really just wonder where I could get cloud elements from. I can do the titles in After Effects as 3D layers, I suppose. Also, how do you think I would go about making the font look like it's frosting and all?

 

For the cloud elements, I'd so it in three pieces.

First, for a general motion and background variation with the cloudy look, animate a series of cloud images (made in Photoshop, if you want) expanding outward at different rates, fading in and out of each other in various places in the comp, none ever taking over the frame all at once. This might work best with 3D layers, and in fact, if you made a concave "bowl" of 3D layers, all with images of clouds on them, and moved "into" them with the camera, you might get away with murder. Give that a try, if you're feeling frisky.

I'd go over to Detfilms and take a look at what they have for this kind of thing. I doubt you'll find much, it's worth a look. You can also get explosion/tumbling style cloud motion by shooting white liquid being poured into an aquarium from below and slowing down the footage, you might be able to play with that type of setup and get some awesome plates. From there you'd need to do no small amount of filtering and color correction, but the motion would be right, and that's where you should start with effects like this.

Finally, if you know any particle generators, Lightwave hypervoxels would be ideal, Particular could certainly handle this, Maya, Blender, etc, go ahead and play around with that for the little poofs that the logos flying through the clouds create. (Specifically the film's title.) You might also want to get a swirly, turbulent grid of particles to put on top of everything, and, in the same vein, perhaps real stock footage of snow. (That I know they have at DetFilms, because I shot it. )

For the text, first of all, the font is half of the battle, but I've seen emulations of it elsewhere, so start at 1001Fonts or something and dig until you come up with it. "Beyond Wonderland" is a font similar enough to this that it could be tweaked into workability, and I know that's available on 1001Fonts.

For frosting, without getting into generators in a 3D app, a great hack for growing frost involves using the Mandelbrot generator in most compositing applications, zooming into a particular arm of the pattern, and setting a keyframe to evolve the iterations more over time. The effect is a crystalline growth, which can be used creatively in several ways to get a surface-frosting look. Like I said, getting the motion is key, the texture of the effect is secondary.

For general frost that doesn't change, I'd handle that in Photoshop with a noisy paintbrush.

Good luck.

 

That halfway went over my head. Hehe.

 

This should do the trick, a fly-through clouds recipe:

http://library.creativecow.net/articles/rippon_richard/cloud_flythru.php

 

Thank you! I wanted something more like this!

 

you know how it is, Fig. Keep it simple

 

You might want to do it all cgi, especially since the harry potter and warnerbro's logos are usually 3d.

For clouds, you could have some volumetric ones in the scene in whatever cg program you're using.

If you want to do it in AE or something similar (there may be something better. forgive me, i dont have AE, lol) you could get some stock footage of smoke and animate it with the flow of the camera.

 

Yeah, I don't have a CG program, therefore I need help with just doing it in AE.

 

What you'd do in AE would still be considered CG (Computer Generated), just not 3d.