Black Mirror
Style frames created for a mock title sequence for Netflix’s Black Mirror.
This piece explores an “analogue glitch” style, intentionally misusing or malfunctioning devices like scanners and CRT monitors to represent the show’s themes of humanity and technology pushing and pulling and abusing one another.
Technique
To avoid looking too “modern” or digital, I stuck to more analogue processes like scanography, printing on low ink, and messing with CRT monitor playback to get some unsettling glitch effects that we’re not as used to seeing.
The CRT glitching was done with a Tachyons+ Opti-Glitch board plugged into an old CRT TV. The output was then captured on a laptop using an RCA-USB capture card. While it was fun to play with, the output was a bit too low-res and the glitching often rendered the screen mostly illegible, so these glitches didn’t get used in the final frames.
Text Warp Effect
While the images themselves were literally dragged across a scanner to get the warpage and color displacement, I wound up simulating the effect in AE to maintain a bit more control over the titles’ text itself.
I created an initial comp in AE to animate gradients with various horizontal/vertical motion and different levels of black+white. The gradients comps were then used as a displacement map on the text. If you push the max displacement far enough, the text starts to get that similar jagged warp that a scanner would give. After the basic displacement maps, I’d go in and tweak things a little with mesh warp, mirror, etc. (Credit to Ben Radatz for figuring the gradient map out, by the way. I simply adapted and tweaked the technique for what I needed.)
Scans
Keeping with the theme of analogue tech/humanity, I scanned images of both clear human figures and pieces of old communication technology in an attempt to render both eerie and alien.
