We. Do. Bones. - A Locked Tomb Teaser
Personal Project
Created by JC Tecklenburg
Music by Steve BlumenthalAccepted Chicago Moonlighters Film Festival 2025
What started as just a type treatment expanded to “what if I do stills?” and expanded to “what if I make something loop?” and finally expanded into this full teaser animation.
Starting with “What If…”
This project started on viewing this Celestial Maze tweet and thinking that treatment would be killer for the Gideon The Ninth lettering. “What would that look like when animated like this?”
I made my own version of the effect within After Effects. The letters still need to be split into strokes manually, but from there the strokes would animate out randomly with a random fade direction. The rig was built to art-direct specific elements on top of the randomness to dial in the final look.
Well, What is it going to sit atop?
The next logical step was to put the type lockup on top of something. The book focuses on the interplay of 8 sects of a civilization, named in a poem. I figured I’d make a simple and quick 3D scene for each of them, then cut to the logo and that’d be the project…
Looking back now, the scope was always going to balloon into a teaser with full animation and multi-shot scenes.
The first step was to download every 3D model of a skull from the internet and get making.
Production, Organized
After experimenting within a single project file and dialing in rough timing, I created a production spreadsheet to keep the project organized. It was essential in keeping track of my progress and getting it completed in addition to my typical workload.
Behind The Scenes: Planned in Advance
As the project grew in complexity, It became clear that it could be used as self promotion. During completion, content that could be used to make social clips was collected diligently.
Intentional Lighting
Lighting is how a form is viewed and defined. After accidentally giving the skull basically an all-specular material, any softness was made with an array of decaying/scaling lights. The drama comes from hard far-side key-lights, a softer fill, and strategically places highlights. Fun Fact: Each skull is deformed to make each houses’ skull unique!
Compositions Shine in Composite
When it came to compositing, every shot followed six key steps:
First I broke the render into components.
Then I added a gradient background
before layering at least three stock atmosphere clips for depth.
I clipped and blurred highlights on the skull in two stages to mimic a ProMist filter.
I placed optical flares on gold highlights, usually by hand-keying position and brightness because shots were short.
The main composite lift was applying depth of field in post with Fast Bokeh Pro. The plugin is great but it revealed to me that Redshift depth passes are aliased, because artifacts showed up on contrasting edges. I fixed it by expanding all of my depth mattes by 1–2 pixels by using a minimax effect. I accepted the potential for 1 pixel focus artifacts along object edges over the very noticeable convolutional blur artifacts.
Each shot had individual composite needs like, DOF through the inside of a gemstone or creating whole elements in composite but those will be highlighted in their own videos.