Today, we decided to create some titles for the film Titanic. We decided to create an animated sequence. The first thing we needed to do was create the things we wanted to animate. We made the Titanic by tracing around a photo of the ship using shape layers. We made some sea by creating a solid and adding a “wave warp” effect to it. We tweaked the settings so it looked like it was moving to the right. We added ramp effects to both the sky and the sea to give it more depth. We then animated the ship moving along the surface of the water.
The next seen we wanted to create was the ship hitting the iceberg. We created an iceberg using the shape tool. We wanted it to seem like it was night, so we added an adjustment layer over the sea. We then changed the ramp on the background to a darker blue. We set up a mask to slide between the day and night, and had the ship dissapear behind this mask.
Once the mask had completed its slide, we animated the ship to come back in from the other side of the screen. We reversed the ship composition so it was moving the other way. We simple animated the ship crashing into the iceberg.
Next we wanted to make some smoke that would come out of the ships funnels. We did this using a particle simulator called “particle playground”. We used a Cannon emitter to disperse the particles and set them to white. We also changed the gravity for to pull the particles to the left as it was moving with the ship. We then added a blur and colorama effect to the particles to make it look more like smoke.
We then added some simple titles to the animation. The first, were animated to swim in the water across the screen. We did this with some simple keyframing. The next was on the ship itself, which was done by simply parenting it to the ships composition.
The cinematography title was also attached to the ship, but when it hit the iceberg it slides off. We did this by animating its position and adding an echo effect to the text to give the effect of it sliding off the boat.
