Concept and creative process
Opening titles for ‘The Life Laundry’, a series which helped people to streamline their lives by clearing out clutter and turning unwanted possessions into cash. The titles sought to express the ethos of the programme in visual terms by filming the kind of detritus acquired over a lifetime, tumbling weightless in the air against a background of dark stormy clouds. As the sequence progressed the quantity of things got fewer and the sky grew lighter, until finally it was almost clear blue with a couple of bits of paper left blowing in the wind. The individual objects were filmed high-speed against a chromakey background in a studio, from different angles and at different sizes. The cloud backgrounds were time-lapse library footage. The filmed elements were individually layered and composited in digital post-production over the backgrounds to the density required by the mood – the darker the sky, the more elements and so on, until the sky was clear. A striking image that made the point of the programme in a memorable way.