Adding futuristic styled location Information

When I was young my dad was always a massive James Bond fan, we spent many a movie night watching all kinds of films but the majority was always watching the Bond movies. (Specifically the films that featured Sean Connery, Timothy Dalton and Pierce Brosnan).

When I was watching iRobot recently another film which I really enjoyed growing up, it made me think. If this film had on screen location cards like in the Bond movies, what would they look like? With that I looked online and found this clip from Pexels - Aerial View of City Landscape on a Foggy Day.

Assembling Everything in After Effects.

I added the video to the composition and trimmed it down to just before the camera begins to rise and pan over the towers. I knew going in that this wasn't going to be as extravagant as the other effects that I had worked on but my goal was to have something simple and clean.

The next part was to track the camera, I wanted to add an anchor point that would be realistic to somewhere between the building in the middle. I wanted it just above the two points of the building.

I skimmed through the footage after the successful camera track and found a point that was in the middle of the peak of the building. I selected the point and then right clicked and added a new Null and Camera.

With the new point added that I could fix the text layer too, after I added the text I then copy and pasted the track point location data to the text layer adjusting the size, position and orientation until I was happy with how the camera flew over the buildings.

I added a drop in effect, with the text falling in and then added twp key frames so that way I could animate the text dropping in from off screen landing on top of the building.

I decided on a sonar effect to give it a neon light flicker effect, because this was a futuristic idea that I wanted to go for I wanted to give it the feeling that it was like a hologram that is being projected from the top of the building.

I then copy and pasted the text layer two more times for a total of three, I adjusted the sonars frequency per layer and also dropped the opacity on one to give it a slow flickering per letter look to achieve the hologram effect.

I added a lumetri colour effect to try and make it look like an evening in the city, the colour values that I tweaked above helped me achieve the outcome I was looking for.

I then changed all the falling times to give it a multi layered effect, changing them all to ease in as well. The reason for this, was you couldn't really see all of the letters from the multiple layers. Changing this I thought made the effect look more at home above the building almost like it was detecting a hover car flying over and was displaying that they were now entering the West City.

Wrapping Up.

Below is the final video that I had settled on, with the colour settings that I played around with it really did give it that fantasy dystopian look that I wanted. I think I would definitely like to experiment more with this, I think an opening if I got enough footage to use to cut into something would look really cool. Pairing it with the 3D modelling I plan to look into over the summer I would like to go back and add some sore of hovercrafts flying over the city.

Thanks for reading!