CGI & Illustration
WHY? Doomsday Preppers
/// Overview
The 3D title sequence for the Doomsday Preppers episode of Todd Sampson's WHY? on ABC: one camera move through a prepper's house, in a world of night-vision green where only what the prepper keeps turns yellow.
/// The Challenge
Every episode of WHY? opens with a short 3D title built from its own world. Director Keke Marc Robertson gave each episode one colour and kept the WHY? title yellow in all of them. Doomsday Preppers got night-vision green, and the job was to hold that rule inside a photoreal house without the picture turning into one flat green.
/// The System
I set the rules of the look. The whole world is night-vision green, and whatever the prepper trusts turns yellow: the toy soldiers, the food, the clock hands. Each colour gets its own light, and the green never spills onto the yellow. Everyone is a plastic toy, and the camera never cuts, so the yellow comes and goes as the house goes by.
/// The Process
It started with an early style frame, a range target in the dining room, where the green room and a single yellow object already worked. The animatic blocked every room and the camera path in Cinema 4D. Sets like the stockpile wall went from clay to a pass with real materials before turning green, which left the last yellow for the title that lands on it.