Tutorial: Branding Your Videos with Simple Animated Logo Intros

Choosing a Soundtrack

Everyone’s workflow is different, and different editors use different factors to “drive” their edits. I’ll assume that you’re going to use some kind of soundtrack to accompany your animation, and that many of you will key your animations to the beat, ebb, flow, etc. of whatever music track you choose. So it may make sense to go out and grab yourself a track to edit to before you start editing/animating.

If you’re doing any kind of corporate or commercial video (i.e., for anything other than personal use and consumption), that means going to one of the dozens of royalty-free music sites online, browsing by the mood or feel of your project (energetic, positive, corporate, funky, jazzy, etc.), and picking a track. I can’t really say one site is better than the others, but I’ve been using Pond5 quite a bit lately, and one thing I like about them is that they let you download a preview version of an entire track for free (it’s basically the same as the version you’d pay for, but lower quality and with a persistent audio watermark), as shown in Figure 9 (below). This allows you to experiment with multiple tracks as you make your edits, and even send the project out for client review with a preview audio track on it before you actually shell out $5-$50 for the track.

Figure 9. Downloading a full-length, watermarked Preview track from pond5.com.

Obviously, personal taste and style will guide your selections here, but I recommend that you sample at least a handful of tracks, choose something that will match the mood of your project and play well with your audience, choose a track in a style or type of music that you’re comfortable editing to, and—most of all—something you can cut convincingly at 5-7 seconds (that is, with what sounds like a proper beginning, middle, and end at that length), which should be the target length for your animation.

Animating the Logo

For this example, I’ll import a Pond5 track I already own, surfguitar1.wav, and I’ll select just under 7 seconds near the end of the track because the beginning is more or less interchangeable with the opening measures of the track and the end sounds right for an ending. Working backwards, this gives me about 5 seconds to get all the elements of my logo into place before giving it some time to be intact and impactful at the end.

From here, as with music, how you animate it is a matter of taste and style. Essentially, as you've probably figured out, the object of the exercise is to create an animation that finishes with the logo intact. You create the animation by moving, hiding, resizing, changing the opacity of different elements, and then returning them to their original size/position/opacity. The sequence ends with the logo intact, so you set keyframes there to make that happen, and then set keyframes at the start of the clip to create the motion.

Generally what I do is move elements of the image into place vertically or horizontally from off the screen, locking them into place at decisive points in the soundtrack, or bring them into view either from 0 (zero) Opacity or Scale.

In most cases, unless I’m trying to exert pinpoint control over how the animation ramps up at the beginning, I’ll do just 2 keyframes per graphic or text element, a start point (coordinates off-screen, 0 Opacity, or 0 Scale) and an end point (640/360 or 960/540, 100% Opacity, 100% Scale). Just don’t apply too many moves to a given element; nobody wants to see bits and pieces of your logo zigzagging all over the screen, or anything that makes it appear as if you aren’t in complete control of your animations at all times.

Another option is to use a keyframed blur, and blur a visual element into view. Generally, I prefer to stagger my animations, so the elements emerge in sequence, although animating, say, 2 out of 5 elements at a time adds visual interest as well. At the very least, this gives viewers something to watch at each point in the animation, and builds a progression toward the completed image.

Use the Effect Controls panel timeline to stagger your animations precisely. If you want to start bringing in a second element at the same time your first element locks into place, position your timeline on the second keyframe for the first element, using the arrow controls in the Effect Controls timeline (Figure 10, below), then select the next video track you want to animate, and place your first keyframe there. 

Figure 10. It’s hard to see in the figure, but the second (and final) keyframe for Layer 6 (the word “Librarian”) is aligned with the first keyframe of the Blur in of Layer 7 (“2013”).

Variety and symmetry are both useful tools in your animations; there are advantages to producing animations that progress unpredictably, but also with a sense of order. Keeping in mind that you aren’t going to be creating any earth-shaking animations here, your goals are essentially to announce your brand, convey a vibe that fits it, and hold your audience’s attention for 5-7 seconds until the real content kicks in.