Shifting Russian Text to English VFX on Book

 I was watching "the Hunt for Red October" for genre convention research and saw at the beginning for the main title an effect where the title shifted from the cyrillic to the latin alphabet. 

Since my opening takes place in a library where there are words (English words written in the Latin alphabet) all over my location, I had to do some motion tracking to cover text. The words "South Florida Bible College" are also above the main location, small signs and posters around with English, and the digit "4," which does not exist in the Latin alphabet. 

Even though I could use Google translate for much of my Latin to Cyrillic (and English to Russian) translations, I could not do this for the digits. There are Cyrillic numerals instead of digits. I found a chart online:

And this told me that I need to track and replace the 4 in the elevator with the Cyrillic symbol that looks like an A. 

I wanted to let people know that this took place in Russia and that the reason Novikof is so stressed about getting his book (written by the famous anti-communist author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn) back from the heavily guarded library is because he is Soviet Russia. In order to show both the cyrillic to indicate Russia and tell the audience what the book actually is (and convey the severity of the situation) I needed to have two "copies" of the old red book. 

The old red book is The Voice of the Martyrs 33 A.D. to Today by John Fox:

I used the back of the book for the front because the back has a blank part where I can have the new titles and because Cyrillic books are read back to front. 

At first, I tried finding an embossing company to put the Cyrillic on the book and then some kind of cover that blends into the texture of the book itself and then put the English version of "the Complete Works of Solzhenitsyn on that, but since American embossing companies really don't have Cyrillic characters as an embossing option, and if I made it a logo and had them emboss that, it would be exorbitantly expensive ($70), so I decided to try creating a transparent sleeve with the two different texts painted in the gold "leaf" (paint pen ink). I printed both texts in the same font and font size and placing on the page and then used that under plastic sheeting that I taped together to form two sleeves. I used the printed text as stencils for tracing. I used a small makeup brush for painting detail. 

I went to ask a Russian man who I know works at the local pawn shop if he had a book jacket in Russian that I could put on the book to cover the illegal one in the scene, but he directed me to just make the pdf of the jacket and then have it printed at an Office Depot print shop, so I used this book cover from Pinterest:

I used Photoshop to make a book jacket layout from this:

I then went to Office Depot to print it.

Here is the book when its cover and a sleeve is on:

I had Garrett open the book jacket during the part of the arch shot and then when the jacket was fully off I cut that shot. Then I had an assistant remove the first Cyrillic sleeve and put the English one on, trying all the while to keep the book and the camera still. 

In post, I took the clip with the first sleeve on it and imported it into Adobe After Effects, using the video content aware fill to remove the text from the book. I then went into Adobe Photoshop and used the pen tool to cut around each letter in the last frame of the Cyrillic sleeve, making each letter on a separate layer. I exported in an organized fashion all of the Cyrillic letters as PNGs to keep the transparency. I imported all of these to the After Effects project and animated each of the letter's scale, rotation, and paths with keyframes. I drag the curves of the movement paths over with the handles. 

I then repeated all of these steps for the English sleeve shots and imported both final videos into the Premiere project. 

This was how I achieved the Cyrillic to English book title effect.