THE BRIEF

As part of a motion design course, I was tasked with creating a title sequence inspired by a book. The goal was to extract the narrative essence of the story, translate it into visual language, and bring it to life through animation.

I chose Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore by Matthew J. Sullivan, a psychological thriller that explores unresolved trauma and the lingering impact of the past. The story moves between present and past.

I used Generative AI to create the images and then later on to create the movements inside the frame to create a sense of reality while keeping a vision of AI to create the feeling of it not being real and going back and fourth with peoples memories and real life.

Inspiration

The story timeline goes between the 90's (present) and 70's (the hero's childhood trauma). The story is a psychological thriller and works a lot on emotion and memories, therefore, I tried to mix real architecture with a fitting style to create darkness and drama to the frames.

90's Houses

90's Diners

Rocky Mountains

Urban Decay

90's Neo Noir

rough sketch

FINAL frames

After having sketches and a general idea of the whole storyboard, I used Gemini to create visual token for the frames so there will be consistency between frames even though it might not be in the same place/environment, after creating the final frames, I animated them with Kling with fixes in After Effects, the only thing that I did not use AI for is the book transitions.