The Medienlabor at the University of Augsburg hosts a online show that it is produced by students and broadcasted by livestream.com. Students decide on a topic, create video shorts during the semester and produce the live show at the end of the semester. Everything is done by the students except some guidance by the employees of the Medienlabor. You can watch all episodes at livestream.com  

 

As a former employee of the Medienlabor I was asked to create another title sequence for the last episode which dealt with the broad topic dreams. At the beginning I planned to to do a reusable title sequence for future episodes but discarded this approach for several reasons. I wanted to create a full 3D version but underestimated the render times and overestimated my spare time for working on this project. A week before airing I decided to go for a different approach: Mimic a cutout stop motion film inside Blender 3D.

 

A former colleague provided me photographs of some studio equipment from the Medienlabor studio. I extracted the objects from the background, added a roughly cutted paper background and exported the objects as transparent PNGs.         

In the episode the host of the show and his guest should talk sitting on a bed. The bed, sheets and blankets were modeled in Blender and rendered in Cycles and processed in Photoshop. In the actual episode there is a real bed but it wasn't in the studio while i was creating the title sequence and so I had to improvise.

Everbody using Blender Cycles knows how noisy renderings normally are. With a deadline in sight I had to go for a low sample count. By using an emission shader instead of a diffuse shader 100 samples have been enough. A frame took around 15 seconds on a GTX 960. 

First I thought about making one animation but went for spliting up the animation in different paths to be able to change timing or do some post on it. In the end i animated only parts and combined them later in After Effects.