THRONE OF BLOOD
I Made A Title Sequence
That's it.
After building the initial setup, I thought it looked cool enough to throw in a reel to help break up all of the sports graphics. Overtime, I began to hate the reel, as it really felt like it was a series of half thought through ideas. I scrapped everything that wasn't sports related and decided to find something to use as inspiration for the katana shrine.
That ended up being the Akira Kurosawa film "Throne of Blood" - also known as "Spiders Web Castle" in Japan. The film was a wealth of inspiration, from creepy oracles to cinematography. One of those scenes involves samurai warriors swaying trees back and forth as they encroach upon the castle for the climax of the film.
Everything was built in Cinema 4D using the Arnold Render Engine, and After Effects, utilizing a mix bag of motion graphic elements and techniques to help me along the way. A paint rig for Cinema 4D, my Japanese language training and Optical Flares helped me recreate the Toho Studios logo animation. Animated displacement maps and the After Effects puppet tool allowed me to animate the forest from one frame, because I was building all of this on my Mac Mini and didn't have the rendering capabilities to animate and render more realistic movement in Cinema 4D.
Shout outs to Turbo Squid, Free3D, and these folks on SketchFab for help with the 3D assets used on this project: