Nick Gellatly
My Beautiful Laundrette titles — where we are
I worked on the After Effects piece this afternoon and created a number of ‘assets’ ready to animate them for the titles sequence.
I’m working towards a 90 second opening title sequence for My Beautiful Laundrette (1985, dir. Stephen Frears, written by Hanif Kureishi), re-imagined for 2026. Fourteen frames, one wash cycle from coin to open door. Frames 13 and 14 are an optional coda beyond the 90 seconds. I am starting to wonder if 90 seconds is long enough but I will work towards that at this stage.
The style
Bold modern gouache and acrylic painting, faceted and cubist-influenced. Flat painterly illustration, visible brush strokes, every surface broken into angular facets, hard deep-indigo outlines, flattened tilted perspective. Explicitly not photographic, no grain, no 3D, no social realism.
Palette: ink navy #121D27, laundry cream #F0CC96, powders orange #DE802D, vermilion #C0421A, drum turquoise #3F7D75, deep teal #2A5350, ochre sand #D5AF75, brick brown #663E26, pale sage #89A99B. Held back for later frames: turmeric #CB8D28, coral #C28E6D.
Typography is Route A from the style board: Poppins Bold, all caps, tracked out. No lettering inside the artwork. All type is added in After Effects.
The grid
96 BPM against 24 frames per second. One bar is 2.5 seconds, exactly 60 frames, so every cut lands on a downbeat. 90 seconds is 36 bars, 2160 frames. The animatic and the music are both already cut to this grid. Do not move to 25 fps, it breaks the arithmetic.
Slots in the master: F01 0:00, F02 0:05, F03 0:10, F04 0:15, F05 0:25, F06 0:35, F07 0:45, F08 0:52.5, F09 1:00, F10 1:07.5, F11 1:15, F12 1:22.5.
State as of this post
All fourteen frames built in After Effects, assembled into a 90 second master, with all credits set. Built by script rather than by hand.
Assets were generated in Canva and downloaded as PNGs into three folders. After Effects keys the grey backgrounds out itself using Color Key, so there are no separate transparent versions to manage.
The scripts
| Script | What it does |
|---|---|
MBL_Build_Frame04.jsx | builds frame 4 from its 16 PNGs |
MBL_Tune_Frame04.jsx | light, foam and object size on frame 4 |
MBL_Build_Frames_09_10_12.jsx | frames 9, 10 and 12 from 12 PNGs |
MBL_Tune_Frame10.jsx | shrinks the cloth so the figures read |
MBL_Tune_Frame12.jsx | enlarges the machine, tames the light |
MBL_Build_Remaining_Frames.jsx | the other ten frames from 17 PNGs |
MBL_Build_Master.jsx | cuts all twelve together on the grid |
MBL_Add_Titles.jsx | all the credit cards, re-runnable |
MBL_Open_My_Frames.jsx | opens all fourteen frames as tabs |
Every build script has a block marked TUNE at the top. Changing a number there, undoing in After Effects and running again is the way to adjust anything.
Earlier output
Animatic rendered and posted at https://youtu.be/LYVw-TeCt8I (see previous post in this series: https://theoldtimes.co.uk/2026/10/14/motion-graphics-week-4-part-2/ )
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