A logo animation and accompanying audio mix I put together as a digital media/post-production intern for the Akron Zips football team.
Your thoughts, comments, critical feedback and constructive criticism are highly appreciated. I love working on projects like this and am always looking for ways to improve.
I'm mostly self-taught, and have spent a lot of time producing, editing and experimenting with 3D animation, graphic design and VFX compositing over the last few years, but it feels like I've barely scratched the surface of what I still want/need to learn.
I'm looking for internships in Los Angeles for this upcoming Fall, and this video is basically the centerpiece of my online portfolio right now.
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Some quick information about the project:
- Started off as 7 individual 3D animations (with alpha channels for transparency) made in Cinema 4D and rendered as 32bit TIFF image sequences.
- I rendered them at 120-150 FPS (each was 480-600 frames long) (this was done to give me some flexibility when re-timing/timewarping the footage in After Effects)
- They were all combined, re-timed, and blended into one animation using After Effects.
- Of the 7 original 3D renders,
- - - 5 of them utilized hundreds of continuously shifting particle emitters mapped to volume or surface of (invisible/hidden) polygon using matrices, thinking particle groups and xpresso programming.
- - - 1 of them utilized tracer objects and random effectors to create polygons that grew in opposite directions to trace the inner and outer outlines of the Z (to create a lightning-strike-like effect, and to support the 2D rotation of the video)
- The solid, fractured polygon-based 3D render was done as a multi-pass render, and utilized both an alpha channel an inverted Z-depth pass as a Luma Matte (to give the illusion of additional depth and shared 3D space)
Sound FX samples are from http://soundbible.com/
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If you want to see more of my recent projects, you are welcome to check out my portfolio at https://jp030313.myportfolio.com
Not having used After Effects, I don't know how difficult it is to make something like this, but ultimately I wasn't wowed by it. For an animation it's too short, but for an intro it struck me as too long and oversaturated with effects. In particular, having the word "football" appear diagonally and then right itself seemed unnecessary, and its fade back into the Zips logo looked a little cheesy. It may have taken time and lots of processing power to render this, but sometimes less is more.
Thanks for sharing your perspective, I really appreciate all the feedback you've given me over the years.
I put together several alternate versions/takes for my bosses and coworkers every time I added a new layer to the animation, and the most obnoxious ones always seemed to get the most overwhelmingly positive responses, so I just kept going back and adding more and more.
Honestly, I agree with many of the points you made, this animation is obnoxious and VERY cheesy in a lot of ways.
Probably got a little too carried away with this one... :D
Nice easy work!!! Eh!
haha, thanks.
It's a short animation, but it took a lot of time, patience and hard-drive space to get it this far!