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We recently had to develop an identity and branding campaign for one of our corporate clients. We wanted to accomplish a fun, Nick at Night type of look for the client and, of course, we had a very limited budget.

We decided to do part of this identity in 3D and the remainder in 2D. We designed a retro looking TV in 3D that would be used in a variety of media, including video and print. The things that occured on the screen of the retro TV would be created in 2D using After Effects. This article focuses on the 2D part of the project and the challenges that we faced.

The first part of our 2D project was creating an open for a video series called FUN TV. The open had to have a fun, rich and textured look and blend in with the 3D elements that we had already created.

We started by building a FUN TV logo in Adobe Photoshop. We were going to build all of our logo elements in Photoshop and then bring these elements into After Effects to be animated. By creating all of our elements in one file on separate layers it will make it easier to animate in After Effects because we can read in the Photoshop file with all of its layers and transparency values intact. This means that if you plan carefully you can build all of your elements in one file and bring them in as one file instead of a multitude of separate files and mattes that would have to be registered to each other again.

To build this FUN TV logo we utilized some tricks to make it appear 3D. By using 3rd party plugins we were easily able to develop the look that we were going after. To create the textures that fill the letters F, U and N we used Kai's Power Tools Texture Explorer and Gradient Explorer. These plugins allowed us to quickly experiment with a variety of textures and colorized gradients to give our logo a light and fun look. To make the oval shape we used a plugin by Kai called Spheroid Designer. This plugin quickly allowed us to generate a sphere with 3D shading characteristics. As a final touch we used a beveling plugin by a company called Alien Skin that allowed us to easily experiment and apply bevels to all of our objects to give them a more dimensional look. We then made shadow layers for all of the objects and merged these files with the source files. We could have added shadows in After Effects as well but by creating the layers in Photoshop we will cut down our rendering time in After Effects.

After we were done creating the logo we had to create some background art for the logo to build over. We created some type that was wrapped around a path in Adobe Illustrator and then rasterized in Adobe Photoshop. We then created some type that spells out what FUN TV is, a last minute client addition, to appear before the logo build. Finally, we created a four color background with a subtle gradient that would serve as the base for the other logo art.

It's now time for us to take our art into After Effects. Since we built all of our art on separate layers it is important that we import it correctly. The first piece of art that we will import is the FUN TV logo itself. We will import this as a Photoshop 3.0 file directly into After Effects. By doing this After Effects will load all of the layers intact and the registration of all of the elements will be preserved in a special composition file. If we look at the time layout window we can see that all of our elements are ready to be animated.

Now before we even touch the FUN TV logo let's work on our background. To create the base background that the logo builds on I am going to take our four color background which is designed to overlap our composition window and I am going to set keyframes so it does a slow rotatation. In addition, I am going to animate a hue change on that layer so that the four colors will slowly change as the layer rotates. We are almost there but to spice it up we are going to do two more things.

First, we are going to take the background layer and duplicate it. I am then going to apply a circular mask to this layer and offset the color effect and rotation. Then I am going to add a light shadow so it looks like this layer is resting on top of the background. We are then going to animate the scaling on this circular layer so it looks like it is rotating into infinity. By animating the shadow on this layer and making the shadow become more opaque and lowering the blur amount as it gets smaller we can enhance the effect of the layer and make it appear that it is moving away from us and not just getting smaller. If we add our circular type and animate them with the same parameters we develop a nice introduction for our animation. Now let's get to work on FUN TV.

Since we have all of our elements where we want them to end up the best way to approach this animation is to work backward. First of all we need to keyframe in and out points for all of the elements that will move. After that we simply move the layers to their start positions. Now this works okay for the FUN elements and other copy but for the TV element we want to try something different. We will animate the oval shape moving into place along with F, U and N but the TV element we will 'write' on using some special effects. What I want to have happen is have arcs of electricity jump out from the sides on the screen and write TV onto the oval shape.

We will accomplish this buy using a lightning effect, a lens flare effect, and a particle effect. All of these effects come with After Effects with the exception of the particle effect. For this job I used a plugin called Final Effect's Particle Effects II from Metacreations to generate my particles. The easiest way to accomplish this effect is to add additional layers to our composition and add the effects to these layers. We will add layers of black and animate the lightning effect on these layers with the filters controls. We use the end point attribute to make the lightning mirror the shape of the letters. We then add a lens flare effect that follows the end point of the lightning to brighten things up a bit. We also track a small particle emitter to the lightning end point to simulate sparks. By keeping all these effects on different layers it is easier to move them around, adjust parameters, and control interaction with other layers. To remove the black from the backgrounds we use a filter called unmult (a free plugin from a company called Knoll Software) that strips the black information out of the layer. Finally, we need to animate a matte that reveals the TV layer as if the lightning is writing the word TV on the oval shape.

Now to set up this effect required some frame to frame keyframing and it took a little bit of time to get the effect to register correctly. Since we are only doing about thirty frames of keyframing and the lens flare obscures most of what we are doing our precision does not have to be perfect. In addition, there are shortcuts in After Effects that allow us to share keyframe data from different filters. Buy using a feature called Motion Math we were able to use keyframe date from the lightning filter and use it to tell the particle and lens flare filters what they should track.

After we looked at the animation we decided that the FUN letters need to 'wiggle' so we used a feature called, appropriately enough, the wiggler. This feature allowed us to quickly add random motion to the F, U and N layers. With motion blur turned on the wiggler gave the letters a nice, addled look. We rendered this animation out as an intermediate file and then used After Effects' motion tracker to drop it on top of our 3D element. The client was happy with their animation and we were able to add another layer of value to a project by splitting the project into both the 2D and 3D realms.

Next month we'll talk about how we designed the 3D portion of this project without a modeler and without buying a model. Sound interesting? Check it out next month in Visual Magic. Take care.

Copyright © 1998, Chris Bernard


Chris Bernard lives in Chicago and works as an animation and design director at an integrated marketing communications company. He can be reached at thenerve@enteract.com