Tag Archives: After Effects

Animated Idents

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I had the pleasure of doing a smattering of smaller animation jobs here and there over the last few months. These have been fun as often they call on a variety of skills and the whole project needs to be put together quickly, so you’re usually with it from start to finish.

The two Idents (essentially moving logos) in this post were produced at Blue Rocket Productions under the direction of David Gurney. David is fun to work with and has a spontaneity that can take projects in fun directions.

The first is for Tasmania’s government funding body for film Screen Tasmania.

The soundtrack in the Screen Tasmania Ident was produced by the talented Nicholas Storr.

The second animation is for The Australian Script Centre. There is no established audio for this one so I grabbed some music from freestockmusic.com/.

Both of these Idents were made using 3DS Max, After Effects and Photoshop.

Little Tip: I really like adding grain to the things I do but find the film grain in After Effects takes far too long to calculate. I’ve found making a grain loop created in Photoshop does the trick, simply overlaid on top of the footage in Multiply mode then adjusting the opacity to taste. For all I know this could be the oldest trick in the book!

Playing in Grading Land..

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Someone mentioned that I should have spent a bit of time doing some colour grading on the Tin Dragon animation to make it a bit nicerer. After scowling a little I saw it as an opportunity to mess around a bit in After Effects and you know, learn something.

I checked out the slew of tutorials on the interwebs and each seemed to do it a little differently. After trying out a few techniques I settled on a combination I thought looked nice. So here are the obligatory before and after images:

Original.

Graded.

While I like it on one level, this effect is so common to achieve a film appearance it might be worth looking for other options.