Permanent Collection

Yes Captain Steps Into the Breach for NodeFest ’25 Titles

Posted on Monday, December 8, 2025

When the studio booked to deliver the 2025 NodeFest opening titles suddenly backed out, conference organizer James Cowen and his motion crew at Yes Captain in Melbourne, had just three weeks to knock out a replacement sequence.

James Cowen: “With this tight timeline, we leaned into the limitations and focused on a minimal color palette and rendered everything in Cinema 4D’s hardware renderer (OpenGL), which saved a bunch of time. The result was a vibrant, deliberately lo-fi look that suited our motion design audience and was a ballsy start to NodeFest volume 8.

“Our concept was to show 3D models of each presenter’s face during the titles. With no time or budget to model each head, we turned to Sparc3D, a free, AI-powered 3D model generation tool. It only accepts one photo and the results are mixed. Sometimes incredible detail, sometimes completely different glasses.

“The result was a vibrant, deliberately lo-fi look that suited our motion design audience and was a ballsy start to NodeFest volume 8.”

“Each speaker had provided a head shot that we used in traditional digital marketing for the event. So we uploaded those to Sparc3D. It can be a long wait with many people in the queue.

“Eventually, we got 3D models in GLB format and took them into Cinema 4D. We poly-reduced the models to make them more manageable and to be able to better show the contents. Some models weren’t an accurate representation of the speaker so high-contrast lighting, wireframe overlays, and cloner fx were used to stylize them.

“We changed the viewport settings in Cinema 4D to cyan and red’s so that our palette was embedded in any hardware renders. The project was completely edited and composited in DaVinci Resolve and Fusion.”