Behind-the-Scenes


Even if you are not a fan of True Detective, both season's opening credit sequences are incredibly beautiful works of art. I've always been a huge fan of opening credit design, from the amazing work of Saul Bass all the way up to Fincher's work - among many others. And while True Detective's season one opening sequence was incredible, it wasn't until the song and style of season two hit that I realized just how strong the words and image style screamed pirate.

Leonard Cohen's song 'Nevermind' is the basis and the cut of the song changes almost every week during the opening credits. I chose the version that I thought spoke best to the pirate lifestyle to use for this project. I believe it is the version that opened the season.

Initially my intention was to create a homage that was simply about the pirate lifestyle and Eve in general. But it quickly became obvious that the project needed a focus. My only hesitation was that I wouldn't be able to give credit to every single member of Stay Frosty. Once you start naming names people tend to feel left out, which is unavoidable and I only hope no one feels that way. This project is intended to represent all of us. To make things as fair as possible I used Directors and those on the top of the killboard as credit names. There some exceptions. Cyber Ten's name is on there because of our history together, he and Lex are huge reasons why I started down this pirate path in the first place. Oddsodz is named because he asked to be included on Twitter, which I thought was pretty ballsy. Roc is included because he was my inspiration to start blogging and his music rocks. And Morg and Arch are there because they keep me entertained on Slack.

"Wrong Ammo Productions" is an inside joke that long-time readers will recognize. Using wrong ammo was the instigation incident that led to me leaving Tuskers and starting Stay Frosty over two years ago.

I never intended to make a shot for shot recreation of the sequence. I wanted to use it as inspiration for an Eve version, keeping the same edit beats but using Eve related content and interpreting each scene myself. Here is a side by side comparison with the original title sequence and the final Stay Frosty version:


I think you can see what I mean. While it would be possible for me to totally re-create the original that was never my intention. Much of that is dictated by reality, I obviously don't have the resources to create real models that look like Eve characters and film them in a studio. In addition, access to character creation tools inside of Eve is also extremely limited. So I had no choice but to grab what I could from the three characters I own. 

A few people have asked about the technicals. The entire project was created in Adobe After Effects, almost all of the individual scenes are pre-comps brought into a master timeline. Some effects are master level effects, such as grunge, cloud and dirt effects that run over multiple scenes. In addition there are lighting effects that work over multiple comps. Some scenes were not pre-comps because they were simply video that was color-corrected. All in all this resulted in 175 total layers with 34 pre-comps in the final composition.

Obviously a lot of Photoshop work went into this as well. Shadows, dapples, textures, all created in Photoshop and then imported. I used a lot of footage from Eve trailers but I also grabbed a lot of live action from Project Jeremy. Mostly I used the built-in screen capture tool in Quicktime Pro to capture video of both characters on green-screen and ships from Jeremy.

I didn't keep track of time on this project for some reason, but I estimate about twenty hours total. Maybe a touch more. I only picked at it a little at a time, so it is hard to estimate exactly.

The reaction has been above and beyond what I expected. I appreciate all the supportive comments and the hate the video has generated. I'd expect nothing less from this amazing community. So thank you. 

The only limitations to doing more videos like this is technical. There are even more ambitious and wonderful projects that would be possible if we had access to the proper tools to create them. But that is understandably a challenge. As with all challenges however, it remains one that we continue to try and overcome.

Onward and upward.

If you have any specific questions, please feel free to ask them in the comments.


PS: All due credit to Leonard Cohen on the song by the way. The comp is supposed to have another credit included, but for some reason that layer did not render in the final version. The "theme" credit was supposed to say "T Bone Burnett and Leonard Cohen".