Why It Takes 13 Bits

And not just 2, 3, 6 or even 8...

We did the titles yesterday. We had been mulling it and prototyping it for a while and had both gone in a completely opposite direction from the one we ended up with. I had been visualizing one thing for a long time and we had been working on that, Meredith in Motion and I in After Effects.

She had had her reservations, but was gamely working on it. I think I actually had a good thing going with After Effects, but eventually I yielded to her doing something on Motion while I went to work on the title music.

At some point, I looked over and, instead of using the Lumia light art, itself, as background, she had somehow incorporated one of Wilfred's seminal flowcharts about what Lumia is. Beautiful and strange work done in his own hand. I instantly liked the idea and told her so. We then set out to run with that.

We switched seats and I gathered more of his drawings and graphic detritus - none of which we used in the final titles, but all of which confirmed to us that we were on the right path.

We switched seats again and I put down the music to backseat drive for a while. I suggested that we just animate the document in our top-secret motion graphics program, which I cannot name now. She liked the idea. We did that together, both of us tweaking this and that, Meredith at the controls. We finally exported it and then brought it into Motion.

The rest of the process was our usual back-and-forth of "I like this color," "what do you think of this?" "let's do this," "change that," "make that move faster," "make that stay longer" for a long time. Between the two of us, we came up with something that we both really liked.

Then, there the inevitable small glitches. Meredith fixed some, I had to pull up an ancient Photoshop trick to fix another.

We finally had some cool titles, ones that we hadn't intended to do at all, but which we like much better than the original idea.

The moral of this tale? Stay flexible. Stay openminded. A little creative arguing can be a good thing, just so long as it's civil.

And don't forget to add some huevos rancheros and breakfast burrito from Miracle Grill to fuel the whole process.

Onward.