Let’s Get Spooky

*Note this is my edit of the intro and not the one used by Dropout/Dimension 20.

The folks at Dropout approached me to develop a scary title sequence for one of their flagship show’s, Dimension 20.

Dimension 20 is a tabletop role-playing game show produced by CollegeHumor, and generally hosted by Brennan Lee Mulligan. The series is a wonderful blend of comedy and D&D adventuring as all the players are typically comedians.

This particular season's campaign centers around a horror driven multiverse spin on well known fairy tales.

This project came with its fair share of obstacles. All the work was to be completed in around a month. In total, we needed around 15+ full screen graphics with animation covering the span of 45 seconds.

Making that much good design work in such a short amount of time with a skeleton crew was going to be a challenge. We were going to need additional visuals besides original designs and animations to fill the runtime. I suggested we use old creepy archival footage to help flesh out any remaining gaps in the video. I used archive.org to pull all the video clips. It was fun digging through 100+ year old clips to find things that fit within the fairy tale narrative.

Another challenge was that all the old creative commons footage and fairy tale imagery I was finding was at an extremely low resolution. I needed art that was at least 2k in order to do animated punch-ins and assemble crisp photo-collages. I used video and photo AI upresing apps to overcome this. Those apps gave me enhanced 6k versions of all the assets that might have otherwise been unusable.

Lastly, stock assets get a bad rap, but I found some that were really useful and saved me a lot of time. Don’t sleep on Animated Markers by AE Juice and Cinemarkers by Acidbite. Both are wicked!

Client: Dropout

My role: Art Director, Creative Director, Lead Design, Secondary Animation, VFX, Secondary Edit