Tutorial: Animating a Company Logo in Adobe After Effects CC
While animating a client's logo can be a time-consuming process, it adds more production value and life to your video projects. This tutorial will demonstrate how to create dynamic logo animations using Adobe After Effects CC and Adobe Illustrator.
Animating the Logo
Now that we have all of the logo elements back in their original spot, we can now begin to animate the logo. This logo is for a technology company who manufactures products used in tethered photography. The idea is to create a flash that comes from the camera and then have the tethering cable animate in, underlining the company name. Essentially, we are applying two different effects to this logo.
I am going to fast forward a bit and apply the lens flare flash effect to the camera. You can check out another tutorial I created, Creating a Lens Flare, to learn this technique.
Now that we have our lens flare, we will apply the effect to make the tethering cable look like it is growing from left to right while underlining our company name.
For this, will use a prebuilt effect. Navigate over to the Effects and Presets panel and type Linear Wipe (Figure 11, below).
Figure 11. Choosing the Linear Wipe transition.
Drag the Linear Wipe effect over to the cable layer and let go. This has now applied the effect to the cable layer. Next, we'll adjust the keyframes for the Linear Wipe. Starting with the Transition Completion (Figure 12, below), we can get a quick preview of what the default effect looks like. We want this to animate over time, so we will mark keyframes in the Transition Completion section.
Figure 12. Start with the Transition Completion to preview the Linear Wipe effect.
Select the clock icon next to that area to activate keyframes. We'll move the playhead in the timeline to right before the flash is complete. Now change the value of the Transition Completion to 100 back in the effects control panel. Next, move the playhead to the right to about the 1-second mark and adjust the value for the transition completion to 0. Now the cable will animate over this time from the camera to underlining the company name.
You can do a RAM preview of what you have created. (For this example, you can see the effect around the 6:04 mark in the tutorial video below.) You can also add some sound effects or other effects to enhance the animation. You can export this by navigating to file in the toolbar and then selecting one of the options available.
There you have it, There are countless ways to use After Effects to help bring life to static logos. Check out some of my other tutorials linked to in the Related Articles list below to learn how to apply those techniques to your logo projects.
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