Sunday Night at the Movies

As with all graphics on Fox Classics, the palette for this spot was restricted to orange, black and white. Being that this is Sunday “Night” at the Movies, it made the most sense to use black as the base color. Most of these movies  are  from  the 60’s/70’s and when I heard the music (The Supremes) I thought of one of those old 70’s-style beaded door curtains and decided to use that as the basis of the design. Instead of beads I made an old-style TV screen shape in Illustrator and copied it as a mask into After Effects. Each bead layer was positioned in 3D space with the following expression applied to the Y-Rotation property to make it spin gently back and forth:

offset = index;
Math.sin(time + offset)*50

Making “index” the offset means that when one layer is duplicated it won’t rotate identically to the next. Change the “50” value for more or less rotation. You can also adjust the Y-Orientation value separately for more control over the look.

This next expression was applied to the Scale property of the rotating TV screens. This flips a layer depending on whether it’s facing the camera or not and ensures a text/image layer isn’t presented backwards when it spins around:

[(toCompVec([0, 0, 1])[2] > 0 ? 1 : -1) * scale[0], scale[1], scale[2]]

I wanted these movies to look like new releases so color graded them heavily to freshen them up. To add glamour I used Knoll Light Factory for the background flares and Tinderbox Starfield (now obsolete) combined with After Effects Camera Lens Blur  for the blurred lights – which also add depth to the spot.