LEO MILANO

Motion · Title design

Ready Player One

Opening titles written as code: the film's credits glitching out of an old terminal

Ready Player One is about a world so broken that people live inside a game instead. For its opening titles I turned the credits into code, `const readyPlayerOneCredits = {…}`, and let the system crack: terminal text overloads, names flash in red and cyan, and the dream of the OASIS shows its wiring.

Year
2025
Role
Concept, design and animation (all my own work)
Tools
Adobe After Effects

So the credits are written as code, the way the OASIS would store them: a cast list, a crew block, stunts, a loop group, a camera team.

Brief

Opening titles for a film of my choice. I chose Ready Player One: a world where reality has become unbearable and people move into the OASIS to live “for real”, at least there. The hunt for the Easter egg is a fight for power over a dream: whoever controls the OASIS controls the attention, desires and freedom of millions.

It is a film about escape as both rescue and trap. A virtual life gives you a new self, but makes you easy to control and to sell to. The real question is not who wins, but what matters more: a perfect world, or being able to live in an imperfect one.

I wanted to turn the film's dreamy look inside out and show the underside of a broken system running through people's lives. So the credits are written as code, the way the OASIS would store them: a cast list, a crew block, stunts, a loop group, a camera team.

I used typography and nothing else: the interface style of old terminals, compositions overloaded with extra text, jerky movement, glitches and displacement.

01/05 Red monospace credits on black with Steven Spielberg highlighted in a glowing cyan bar, Zak Penn and other names layered around.
02/05 Cast lines in red code, actor: "Tye Sheridan", with the name blown up in a cyan highlight.
03/05 Red and pink streaks sweeping across the frame over half-hidden red text.
04/05 Orange-red glitch frame: huge file paths like vault/keyfrag over a stunts code block.
05/05 The title Ready Player One in cyan monospace with a red ghost offset behind it, on black.

Process

I set the rules first: one typeface, Input Mono Regular, and three colours: red F50817, cyan 1CFFE9 and orange FF4D00. The music is “U Weren't Here I Really Miss You” by Cult Member. Then I storyboarded the sequence and built an animatic: plain red code typing itself out, block by block, before any glitch was added.

Slide: Input Mono Regular, three swatches F50817, 1CFFE9 and FF4D00, and the track U Weren't Here I Really Miss You by Cult Member.
Storyboard slide with nine small frames of the sequence: loading, crew names, glitch close-ups and the title.

Result

A 73-second opening sequence, plus promo carriers in the same language: a metro poster and a desk mat.

A lightbox poster between two escalators in a metro station: ready player one in cyan over red code, with the date mar/28.
A wide desk mat printed with red and cyan glitched credits under a white keyboard and a monitor.

Credits

  • Music: “U Weren't Here I Really Miss You” by Cult Member, used for study purposes
  • Credits text: the real cast and crew of Ready Player One (Warner Bros., 2018), used for a student title sequence
  • Mockups: stock templates

HSE Art and Design School, BA Communication Design