Title Practice.

Yesterday I was practicing an abstract logo for myself. Our final project in our editing class is to create a logo for ourselves on Avid Media Composer. The people who know how to use After Effects can use it but must explain how they did it to the class.



I decided to spend some time using the "Beam" effect in AE. I animated a group of 5 beams streaking across the circle and duplicated it to form the animation. I had it stutter between 2 to 6 frames to the plucking of the guitar with a simple glow effect. The 3 "beam squares" are actually all on the same "Z" space (meaning they're all just as far away from each other in distance) but I've added the "Lens Blur" effect to simulate depth of field.

My circle was created using the "Ellipse" Tool and keyframed to slow down at a certain point and drag on out slowly before fading/blurring away to give that organic feel of water droplets. I also added a mask to half the circles when going beyond the main circle.

The "Gaussian Blur" Effect was added to unsharpen the logo to blend better with the grain and light leak overlay. Not to long ago, I had a client who supplied me with a pack of film grain, scratches, and light leaks. I simply set their blending mode to "Hard Light", set a base grain, and 3 light leaks for beginning, middle, and end. I think I over did it on the grain and leaks, but hey, I'm just having fun with it.

I also added a solid on top of the final comp with a radial "Ramp" effect on top with a yellow in the center to black on the edges. It's not so apparent with the grain on, but it adds some slight detail to the texture of the logo. Finally, I added the Video Copilot preset for "AfterShake" to simulate the juttering of the gate of an old camera. I need to work on that since I just slapped on the preset and did minor tweaks to its controllers.




This is the first time I've ever messed with something like this on my leisure. Hopefully, I can make one of these every 2 weeks or so just to keep experimenting with new ideas. I believe having this passion to create something and aspiration to keep learning new things about the trade and medium are essential to becoming an amazing artist. Plus lots of coffee, and getting frustrated for 2 hours on what colors to choose.


P.S. Vimeo redesigned their web page lay out and I must say, for once, I'm actually much more pleased with this design than their previous one. This doesn't happen too often for me (Facebook) when pages I visit a lot change their layout and I initially enjoy it.