The video
How it was made
I wanted to imagine the composition and get the ideas down from my head onto paper, so I draw up a rough storyboard of the logo animation piece. Here is the composition plan.
The idea for this logo piece is to demonstrate my abilities to construct a 15 short ident for a logo using basic shapes. I decided to go with something a little more complicated, as in I would instead focus on an original for originality. My idea is to start with an old film tape that transitions into the logo.
I started with designing the initial stages of the animation by adding in traditional film shapes and corners into the composition for the feel that this made-up company specializes in creating media entertainment. The way I did this was duplicating the one shape layer and grouping them together after aligning them together. It should look something like this.
To give the accurate representation of a film tape. I duplicated the top corners and positioned them at the bottom of the composition. In between the lines is one big rectangle layer that acts as the main screen of the tape.
Next was to add in something a little different. This effect wasn’t covered in any of the Canvas materials so it was nice to pull it off here. In short, I used an effect called ‘Motion Tile’ to display the same composition and shapes from all directions. Ideally, I wanted it to move to the left as if a old film was running. Performing this was fairly easy to do, as I had to animate the evolution of the effect and make it stop at a specific point for the next effect to take its place.
I also added a grainy effect to the piece by creating another adjustment layer and searched for the ‘Add Grain’ effect in the effects presets tab.
This will add noise to the screen and will act in the same way as the ‘Noise’ effect in the Fractual Noise section. This will create authenticity and style to the composition.
To make the effects even more engaging. I’ve added a Fractual noise effect to act as the films lines and dust scratches to accompany it. The way I did this was setting the ‘Scale Width’ bar to 1 and ‘Scale Height’ to something around 3,000 for the lines to appear.
I had to animate the evolution of the effect too as the composition moved along. I desired to keep the effect going for maybe a few seconds.
I repeated the process used for the film lines, but this time I had to make the scratches on the composition look realistic for the old film feel. The way I achieved this was by increasing the contrast and lowering the brightness and opacity enough for the guaranteed results to be met.
You can see the white scratches inside the comp as they were intended to be. I animated them to be flowing in with the rest of the effects and to not make it look odd when compared to the rest of the piece. To make the motion graphics piece stand out more, I also implemented a color tint into the composition and made it a sepia color for the old film feel.
There was also a vignette effect in there, as I had also made that to blend in with the feel of the old film look. How I went about doing this is that I’ve created a mask using the ellipse tool and draw an oval in the middle of the composition. I then selected the subtract mode for the mask to invert, giving off the appearance of dark corners. Playing around with the mask’s feather, expansion and opacity would allow me to create a nice looking vignette effect to go along with the start of the composition.
It should look something like this now. You can notice the amount of detail immediately.
The next area was to finish off the remaining seconds of the composition, starting off with a zooming effect into the main rectangle shape before the screen fades to black.
I then created a rounded rectangular shape layer and positioned it in the center of the screen. I plan to have this shape be brought in by animating the position as it moves from the left side of the screen. The shape you see blow is a placeholder for the actual shape, which should be molded into a rounded rectangle.
The main problem that arises from my planned piece was the ability to change a radius of a shape layer as I hadn’t done that before prior to making this happen. I had to look online for a way to do this, and I had. What I did was select the shape and with the Pen tool, carefully select each edge that I wanted to scale.
I repeated the process to the bottom right of the shape to make a nice looking rounded shape.
Next was the text that would appear as the name of the logo. To begin with, I selected the text layer and typed out the name in black color, which I will modify later down the line.
I selected the text layer and created the shapes from text to make each letter movable. This will be much easy to do rather than try and plan out the movement word by word. What I did was select a letter, jump the next letter and select the third one and so forth. The plan is to position them off screen on the keyframe, then hopefully move a few seconds to position them in the right place, in the center of the rectangle shape. This image starts off the process, which took a while to do.
This is another image of the text shapes being worked on for the animation to be smoother. I also easy eased the keyframes just to achieve this. I also dabbled with the opacity, letting them fade into the screen once they touch the main shape for consistency.
As you can see, it’s more noticeable in the image below. I tried to get the best possible result from this and tested the effect out to see if it works or not. A little fix here and there would do the trick in the form of positioning the letters slightly in line with their grouped counterparts.
These are the keyframe that I had to align with one another to make this effect possible. I would position the marker just on the first keyframe, then scroll down to each letter and align those keyframes with the first. The same thing could be said for the opacity keyframes as well since I had to maintain some consistency.
Next on the objectives was to make the end screen look stylish, so I created two new trim path layers on the top and bottom of the rounded shape and set their trim paths correctly so that they begin at opposite sides to make the pathlines of the logo. This was a fairly easy process to do since I knew how to implement these.
The Audio
Now that I have checked everything was in working condition, it was time to place some audio tracks into the composition. The focus will be at the start where the film camera will be rolling. I wanted to add something that matches up with what’s on screen, so I downloaded a film camera audio track and ensured I place it in the right timeframe, considering the audio levels and its keyframes. This is what I’ve done to make the audio clip fade once the camera slows down.
Next, I wanted to use an audio track for the rounded rectangle to make its appearance. The best track for this would typical sound like something being moved around, as I had downloaded a track of a crate being moved on a surface. I used that to align with the rectangle’s debut in the composition.
The fade in from the letters needed an audio track accompanying it, so I collected a whoosh audio file and stuck that in the composition, granted it was suitable to use. Alignment was again key for the letters to make an entrance.
Finally, I wanted to let the pathlines emit a sound when they appear as they strike to border the logo vertically. I downloaded a simple laser audio track and ensured to align the track with the frame in which the pathlines were appearing at.
Overall, this was by far the most worked on piece as I had added in the effects that weren’t covered in the lab materials, like motion tile for instance. If I wanted to attempt another shot at this, I would try and add in more effects and maybe tweak the letters so that they become more consistent as they show up on screen.
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