Recreating the A24 Logo | After Effects Tutorial

hey it's jake and in this video i'm going to show you how i recreated the a24 logo animation let's get started [Music] the branding package for a24 was put together by a company called grand army and they've documented the entire process of branding a24 very thoroughly so check this webpage out if you're interested but to start out i just took a still frame from the logo animation into illustrator and traced their logo using the pen tool and i used the actual animation of their logo as a reference to know which pieces of these characters i was going to need to separate so i created all those shapes individually and labeled them all on their own layers so that when i bring it into after effects it'll be nice and organized now before i actually jump into recreating this logo animation i first want to say why i think it's a good idea to recreate somebody else's work you might be hesitant to try and recreate something somebody else has already created but the reality is that's how i learned after effects in the first place and how i got myself to becoming a better motion designer i took work that i was really fascinated by and by artists that i really admired brought it directly into after effects and animated on top of it trying to recreate all the spacing and timing between keyframes and trying to figure out how it was actually made now in the beginning i probably didn't have that many accurate representations of how something was actually built but it got me into after effects and starting to experiment on my own in trying to problem solve things in a way that i had never done before so even if i didn't end up with something that looked exactly the same as the original i was still experimenting and learning things and pushing myself to do things better and that's why i think it's really valuable to try recreating something that you like obviously giving credit to the artist where that credit is due and never claiming it to be your own original work but with all that out of the way let's actually jump in and start animating this logo so let's get started inside of after effects i'm going to first just import my illustrator file and i want to make sure to import it as a composition and make sure the footage dimensions are the layer size and that way it will bring in all of the individual shapes layers sized to the layer itself and then take a look at the composition that it created here's my artwork just like i had inside of illustrator that's great now i have the actual animation of the logo here as well and it's at 23.976 frames per second which is really what everybody calls 24 frames per second but to make sure that my animation matches theirs perfectly i'm just going to click and drag this video clip to the new composition button so that the new composition is trimmed to the actual length of the animation and it's the same frame rate same resolution and then i'm going to rename this comp so i'll call this a24 recreation and just so i'm not confused i'm going to call this a24 illustrator all right all right what i want to do now is take a look at this actual animation because it's deceptively simple it has a lot of nice little touches that make it look really cool but as far as the animation goes nothing crazy is happening it's just basic shapes sliding in appearing and then wiping off and what makes it look so cool is this rgb split that they did in offset which we're going to get to once we've animated the logo but that actually makes it look a lot more complicated than it actually is and i want to start by isolating just the white portion of this logo if we go to say a frame right here these three colors are all just duplicates of the same animation offset by one frame and blend it together using the add blend mode we're going to get to that in a little bit but i want to just focus on one of these bars so that i can get the timing down exactly right so what i want to do is isolate the white portion of the logo and to do that i'm going to add a color key effect which is kind of a legacy keying tool but it's going to get the job done here i'll just select the white color increase the tolerance maybe increase the feather a little bit just so it's a little smoother and then i just want to invert the alpha channel so that it leaves the white instead of taking it away so i'm going to grab the channel and change it from rgb to alpha down at the bottom and now i have isolated just the white portion of the logo now i might need to go to a point where we can see these thinner lines because i'm losing those pieces right there so maybe turn the color tolerance up until we see all those shapes and then just scrub through and we've pretty much isolated just the white parts which is what i wanted this is all just for reference of the timing of the animation it doesn't need to look that nice i just need to be able to follow these simple shapes so now that we look at this animation with just the white we can see that it's not all that crazy so why don't we start with the first object that comes in there three shapes that come in these bigger portions of each character but i'm gonna start with this part of the a so i'm gonna go into my illustrator composition and with all of these layers selected i'm gonna right click and go down to create shapes from vector layer and that way all of my layers are now shape layers that i can modify the paths of and i'm going to really quickly just rename all of these because i don't like having the word outlines on every single shape layer and now that these are done i'm going to select all these copy and paste into here and color code each character so that i can easily identify it so i'm going to change the four to say yellow i'm going to change the two to a different color like magenta and then this last one can stay blue by the way all of my colors are probably different than yours if you just go to your preferences and to the labels section you can actually customize these to be whatever colors you want they don't have to be the default kind of dull colors i like to make things a little bit more colorful and vibrant so that's why mine probably look different than yours now if i isolate the video by soloing it we can take a look and see that there's actually a scale animation happening over the entire sequence and i'm not going to worry about that right now i'm just going to get this pretty close i'm not going to kill myself with being pixel perfect but the timing and the spacing between keyframes is what i'm more concerned with so let's bring that a bass layer on which is this part of the a and i'm going to walk you through how i approach animating this so first of all i'm noticing that that shape is coming in at the same angle that this shape was actually drawn on and i want to nail that angle perfectly i don't want to accidentally have any drifting on the x-axis so what i'm actually going to do is generate a new null object so layer new null object and i want to angle that to be the same angle as the shape layer so i'm going to turn off the video file for a second zoom in nice and close grab this null object and hold down control or command on a mac to snap to this corner right here this is basically the anchor point for where i'm going to align this and then i'm going to scale up my null really big so that it's the same height as the letter form so right about there and then i'll switch to my rotation tool by pressing w on the keyboard and then click and drag to rotate this out to be the same angle i'm even going to scale this up a little bit more so i can zoom in nice and close right here and be as precise as possible aligning this null object with that corner now i know that this angle is pretty much matched to that shape and what i can do is now parent the a base shape layer to the null object which i'll rename a base rotation and if i separate the dimensions of my position property by right clicking and saying separate dimensions i can now adjust the y position and it's going to be aligned to that angle which ensures that this shape is going to move at the exact angle i want it to not only that i can also rotate this null object i'll just set a keyframe at this rotation value and move it forward in time and then set this down to zero and now i'll know that this shape is perfectly vertically aligned which will allow me to grab the path and extend it up and down like this without having to try and say at this angle match the angle of that without any kind of guide to help me do that perfectly so let me undo before i added those keyframes and we'll get to that in a second but my next step of animating this shape is to use the y position property of that shape to bring in the shape and i'll compare basically the foot of this shape with the timing from the actual video so i'm going to align that part of the shape with this part of the original using the y position like this and then for the top part of the shape since it does stretch out and come back into its final form i'll add keyframes to the path to align the top portion of the shape layer with the top portion of the source video so let me get back to the final resting state which is right there and i'm going to set a keyframe on that y position and i'm going to find where that actually comes to rest in the source so i'm looking at that video file soloed right now with my shape layer still selected so i can see the outline of my shape still and i'm just going to find where i think the final frame was of that movement it eases really strongly into that resting position but i think it's right on that frame that it comes to rest so i'm going to go to that point in time and set a keyframe for the y position and this is a good time to point out that i noticed this video is not actually at 24 frames per second the encoded video is but the animation is posterized in some way i believe it's around 18 frames per second but these two frames right here it's a repeated frame and what that's telling me is that the animation was happening at a different frame rate than the actual composition it was in or the video file that was exported so i did a little bit of just measurement of my own and counting the frames within a second and i believe it was done at an 18 frames per second frame rate so i am going to be posterizing down my animation eventually but at this stage it doesn't really matter the timing of the beginning and ends of every movement are still going to be aligned so i don't need to worry about that at this point so let's jump back in here and i've got my resting point keyframe let's go back to the start of the timeline and find where it should start coming in so this is the first frame we see that shape i'm going to back up one frame before that and just trim my layer with alt or option plus the left bracket and then just shoot this y position back until it's all the way off the frame so now i have my first and last keyframes for this first motion which is the timing the timing is the same but the spacing between those keyframes or the easing is off you can see my shape layer is nowhere near where this shape should be so i'm going to start by grabbing that second keyframe and easy easing it with the f9 key and then go into my graph editor and just really crank this up now i'm using the value graph because i separated the dimensions if they were still combined i would have to use the speed graph but i like the value graph for this purpose so i'm just increasing the influence on that handle and the bottom of this shape layer that's what i'm concerned with i want this to be aligned with the reference footage and right now it's not so i think i need to take some easing out of this first keyframe so that it's closer but even then it's not matching with the alignment so if i pan this over so we can see it from the top it starts out pretty close actually a little bit faster than it should so let me just modify these handles but right about here it needs to be a lot further forward right so i'm just going to adjust that y position forward so that it's aligned which adds another keyframe but now i need to work on the handles because if i go forward it's actually going to overshoot a little bit before coming back to its resting point so i need to bring this handle down and it's actually broken from this handle i want to keep that relationship so i'm going to hold down alt or option and click and drag to bring those two handles back together and if i just scrub through this we can see that the bottom of this layer is matching the source footage much more closely again it doesn't have to be perfect because the frame rates are different at this point but as long as the overall motion is the same i think we're going to be good all right let me get out of that graph editor and i'm going to trim that null object as well just to keep my composition organized and the next step is to animate the actual shape path so i'm going to collapse this up and open up the contents go into the shape group and add a keyframe on that path then i'll just press u to isolate just the keyframes for that layer and back up to the last frame where we see the top edge of this shape off of the screen and that's where i want to move these points right up here to be off the screen but remember i don't want to do it freehand like this and risk getting it off angle what i want to do is go to my rotation of that null again set a keyframe as a backup move it forward in time and then set this back down to zero now i can modify this path just by clicking and dragging on those two points while holding shift to stretch it upwards and i'll just go a fair distance away off the top of the comp and then i'll delete these rotation keyframes so that my shape is angled back where it should be and now i can work on the timing and spacing between those two keyframes so i know that this stretch needs to continue happening i think just a little bit past where that actual resting point of the position value is so i'll grab that keyframe and hold shift to snap it to my playhead right there and then we're going to do something very similar where i easy ease this keyframe f9 on the keyboard and then go into my graph editor because this is a path property i cannot use the value graph i have to use the speed graph so it's going to look a little bit different but i'm still going to just use the handles to basically go to 100 influence on the incoming velocity of that second keyframe now that looks like it's getting a little bit ahead of my reference footage remember this whole time i'm looking at the outline of the path and what we're seeing in the background is just the reference footage and i think that's actually matching up pretty perfectly again i'm not going to kill myself with being 100 perfect especially since the actual source logo is also scaling but as far as the timing and spacing of that goes i think that's looking pretty good so let's turn off the source footage and just focus on that one shape play it back and see how it comes in nice and smooth just like the original logo now from here i'm going to be doing the exact same process for all the other different shapes using every technique that we just covered over and over again for the shapes that need it which is the majority of them and once we get to something a little bit more complicated i'll stop the time lapse and we can talk about it but for now you can really just watch a time lapse of me using these exact same techniques on the other shapes so i'm gonna get to it all right so i've completed the animation for the three base shapes the timing and the spacing of those keyframes are lined up it's nice and symmetrical to the original and i can move on so what i want to do is just take a look at my reference footage and the next two shapes to come on are this dot right here and the semicircle for the two and the way that i'll do this animation is very simple just using a track mat so i'm going to make a new solid layer new solid and i'm going to name this matte and click ok i'll turn off the visibility just for a second and what i want to do is line it up with this portion of my artwork not the source footage because i need this to be very precise so i'm going to grab this layer right here and shut off the visibility of the source footage and this is where i want my matte solid shape to line up so i'm going to move this over and then this is the right edge of that layer if i zoom out you can see the bounds but what i want to do is put my mouse close to that right transform handle and hold down controller command to temporarily snap to this shape layer now i know that's perfectly aligned to this shape and i can move that just above that shape layer and change that track matte to alpha inverted matte and that way when this shape is actually outside of the solid it will appear but as soon as i move it behind it it's going to disappear and that's exactly what i want for this particular animation so i'll turn my source footage back on so i can reference the timing for this shape and i'm actually going to shut off the visibility for my shape layer one more time and it looks like this frame right here is where it starts so i'm going to back up one frame where it's still invisible and trim these two layers to it and from here i just need to do a simple position animation on that shape layer itself so i'm going to add a position keyframe right click and change to separate dimensions and get rid of the y position and repeat this whole process i'm going to go to that final resting position timing which would be it looks like right about there move my keyframe to that point go to the start and then just shift this over so it's completely invisible now i do need to see this shape to be able to push it far enough over so that it's not poking out at all and i'm going to actually hide my overlays with ctrl shift h so that i can just shift that off so that there's no sliver of that shape layer visible right there but now it's nice and perfect ctrl shift h to push those overlays back on i'll just work on the easing again i'm going to just increase this basically to 100 and take off some of the influence on the front of the animation and now that looks like it's aligned pretty close that timing is very similar and i'm going to continue this process for the other shape now these stems right here on the two they come in just in a linear way so what i've done is set up a matte to reveal them and i'm actually going to animate the matte this time so i'm going to use this to wipe it off just so it's completely invisible but it's essentially just a linear wipe for this shape and the shape up here that i'm about to do okay so with that i have the basic foundation of this animation completed with all the basic shapes coming in the way that they're supposed to the same exact timing and spacing it's nothing complicated it's just position and path keyframes but they're eased and timed out really nicely to give it a very nice feel that's what makes this logo so deceptively simple there's not that much going on but a lot of time and effort was put into the details of that timing and spacing to make it look as smooth as it does now if we look real close right here i'm getting a little bit of an issue where i have some semi-transparent pixels between these two shapes so to fix that what i'm going to do is just move my mats a little bit so i'm going to grab let's say the one for the dot since it's not going to be touching the shape at all once the animation is finished and i'm just going to nudge it over to the right a couple times with the right arrow key to fill in that gap and that also happens on these little stems right here on this part of the tube so i'm going to go to that shape right there and this is actually happening because the shapes themselves are separated it's not just the matte so to fix this i'm going to just cheat a little bit i'm going to grab these two points and just tap those down a little bit until it fills up that gap again i can turn off my shape guides right there so that i don't see them and that way that seam will disappear and i might grab this point right here and just nudge it out to the left just a little bit now that seam is gone and i need to do the same thing over here except this is also being covered up with part of the mat so with that matte layer selected i'm going to press p on the keyboard and go to the last keyframe where it was animated and adjust that just slightly to the right but we still have a little bit of a gap so i'm going to do that same trick where i just modify the shape path a tiny bit so little that you probably would never even be able to tell but enough to cover up those semi-transparent pixels now that's good to go now the next part of this animation that i need to take a look at is how everything disappears so if i solo that footage one more time and we go to that point of the animation which is right around here the shapes are all just sliding out and being hidden by mats nothing goes off screen they all kind of just disappear so let's focus once again on this shape right here all it does is move to the left while being hidden by a mat at the same angle as the left side of that letter so i just need to set up some mattes for each one of these shapes so that i can easily just shift them off into the mat and have them disappear so let's do that with this a base shape layer i'll find the timing for where that needs to start sliding off which is right about here it looks like set a position keyframe on the x position and then follow the timing of the original it looks like it's gone right about there so i'll trim my layer to that point in time and shift this over ah but i do have an issue here and that's because i parented it to this null object if i turn both of these on now i can't just shift the x position over so this is a little bit annoying but all i'm going to do to fix it is just add another null between these two so i'm going to just duplicate this a base rotation and rename it a base position and i'm actually going to use the parent pick whip while holding down the shift key to parent it to that base shape but what that shift key did was took all of the transformations of this layer and applied it to that null object so it's now aligned exactly the same and scaled the same even now what i want to do is actually take that parenting off of that null object and make sure my scale is 100 sure enough it is and what i can do is take the base rotation null and parent that to the base position null and what i've essentially done is added in a second layer of control that i can now open up the position separate the dimensions add an x position keyframe and then back it up where it needs to be aligned with this keyframe i don't need these ones anymore so i'll get rid of them but now i can use this second null object to shift this layer over as far as it needs to go to disappear now i don't exactly know how far that is yet because i don't have any of my guides set up but i'll just use a solid layer as a track matte for this shape and what i'm actually going to do is make a custom shape matte so i'm just going to generate a new matte solid layer for right here controller command y and i'll call it matte again and i'll set that as a alpha matte for the a base shape and what i want to do is draw a mask on that shape if i grab my pen tool that's aligned to the angle of that a so i'm going to just click right here be nice and precise and make that mask something that we can actually see so right there at the tip of the a and then i'm going to follow this angle of this part of the a all the way down here and that'll be that edge of the mat and i just need to make sure that it contains the rest of that a but now as i move the shape through it it's going to be hidden by that matte the issue is that if i go back in time that matte is cutting off that shape when it should be going further off the screen so i just need to set up some keyframes really quickly that allow the matte to show the entire composition until it gets to this point where it needs to animate off so i'm going to press m on the keyboard to bring up the mask path property set a keyframe and convert this to a hold keyframe by pressing ctrl alt or command option and clicking on that keyframe now if i go back to the first frame i'm just going to make this matte wider than my composition and because the solid is the size of the composition this is essentially making it completely visible for the entire composition i just need to again ctrl alt or command option click on that keyframe so that this mask does not change until it hits this keyframe right here so now my shape is visible the entire start of the animation and then right here we have a mat that lets it slide off into nothingness now this base shape for the two it basically needs to have a mat the same shape as this curve right here but instead of complicating it more than i need to i'm just going to keyframe the actual path so i'm going to find where that needs to start animating off right about there really slowly and then go to where it's actually off or at least the last frame where it's visible and move this path over to here and that way all i have to do is trim the layer at that point and the next frame it'll be blank anyway right there so i'm going to just ease that and call it good all right i have now completed the animation of all the shapes this is the core of the entire logo animation and from here i can now just add in the special little touches that give it such a cool look and make it feel that much more authentic to the original so this is where we get to dive in and have a little bit of fun in after effects but just before i do that i want to add an adjustment layer at the top of everything so layer new adjustment layer and i'm going to add an effect called posterize time and this will just artificially lower the frame rate of everything in the comp so it's defaulted to 24 frames per second i'm going to drop that down to 18 and now the overall motion of this animation i've created feels a lot more like the original but now let's jump in and add in a bunch of effects i want to take a look at that video again but this time without the isolation of that single color so i'm going to get rid of the color key and the invert we'll take a real close look at a still frame of the logo once it's resolved the first thing you'll notice is that it is pretty soft there's definitely a blur going on but it's also made up of multiple colors and it's not in a uniform way it's not like the left edge of every character is red like it is right here it's in a radial way which is telling me that this was probably done with an effect like optics compensation that will distort your image from the center outwards so if we take a look at this edge of the a this edge of the four we're getting that red fringe and on the inside edges we're getting more of a tealish green color so that's going to help me recreate that look but it's also just softer in general there's a little bit of a blur to it which is giving it kind of a haloy look making it look like it was actually almost projected which makes sense it's a film company but if i back it up to where the animation is happening say right here not only are they giving that kind of chromatic aberration look around the outside edges there's also an offset for each channel each color channel red green and blue one frame at a time it looks like i think that's going to be the first effect that i try to recreate so what i'm going to do is select everything in this comp with controller command a minus that reference footage and i'm going to pre-compose it by pressing ctrl shift c or command shift c on a mac and i'm going to name this a24 animation then i'll click ok now that i have this animation isolated on a single layer i can split those rgb channels the same way so i'm going to add an effect called shift channels which will let me target just the red green and blue individually so on this effect i'm going to take the red from red and turn full off on the green and blue channels so this is all of what makes up the red channel for this composition now i'm going to rename this r for red duplicate it with controller command d and rename this g duplicate one more time and rename this b and then on the green layer i'm going to change the green from to green and change red to fall off and then on the blue channel same thing turn red to full off blue to blue and now i have the red green and blue channels separated into their own layers and to get it to all blend back together i'm just going to select the green and blue channels and change it to the add blend mode and we're right back where we started but what's cool about this is i can now grab the green and blue channels and just shift them forward one frame by holding alt or option plus the page down key and then adjust the blue layer one more frame alter option in the page down and immediately we're getting this rgb split effect so i could play this all back and we're going to get something very similar to what we've already seen as simple as that just offsetting each layer one frame at a time gives us that multi-colored prismy look which is really cool and the majority of what makes this logo animation look more complicated but we're not going to stop there obviously this is still nice and crisp clean vectors and we want to grunge it up a little bit make it look a little bit more like it's actually being produced by light like it has some softness to it so let's just add a soft blur over everything i'm going to make a new adjustment layer layer new adjustment layer and i'll call this effects and we'll add a fast box blur to it i'm just going to increase this ever so slightly i'm holding down control or command on a mac while i click and drag to make very small changes to this number i just want to soften that out ever so slightly so it already looks a whole lot less sharp and i should point out that i rounded the corners of these points right here in illustrator so i didn't need to do any rounding on those inside of after effects but this corner right here is pretty sharp so with this blur on it kind of rounds it out and softens it up which is nice and i think i'm going to be able to get away with it just like that with a tiny little blur but on these corners that were definitely softened out in the original if i solo the original i think those were intentionally rounded a little bit more the letter forms were designed that way so it's those tiny little details that actually make a bit of a difference when you're trying to recreate something like this all right next up is that fringing the chromatic aberration around the edges of the layer now if i were to grab the red channel and just shift it over a pixel or two to the left and grab the blue channel shift it over pixel or two to the right then we're getting that chromatic aberration but remember it wasn't uniform like that across the entire frame on the original if i solo that again we had red on the outside and a tealish green on the inside and this is how actual chromatic aberration works because it's an artifact of the lens it's a circular artifact of the light coming through the lens and around the edges fringing more than it does in the center so this is actually a pretty accurate effect that they've created here in their animation and what i'm going to try to recreate right now so i'm going to put all these back in the center by selecting them and press control or command plus the home key and then i'm going to grab an effect called cc lens and actually i want to show you exactly what's happening here so i'm going to make a grid just by making a new solid and then adding the grid effect and we're going to change it to be the width slider so that we just have a nice square grid behind everything and then on this effects adjustment layer i'm going to add the cc lens effect which turns it into this weird orb but what's actually happening is it's distorting the composition similar to how an actual lens would be distorting around the outside edges if i crank this all the way up to the maximum of 500 it's a very subtle amount and if i turn the convergence down to zero then we're going to have no effect at all but the convergence property allows you to go in either direction either the way that an actual lens would distort or in the opposite if you were trying to do something a little bit more stylized the optics compensation effect can do something very similar to this but i'm actually going to get rid of the cc lens effect on that adjustment layer and i'm going to get rid of my grid and we're going to instead apply this to the individual color channels so i'm going to add cc lens to that red and it obviously doesn't look right so i'm going to turn that size way up and just like that we have a little bit of fringing on the outside edge of the red channel all the way around because it's distorting it in that radial way we're getting that distortion of the red fringing on the outside edges of the logo now i think it needs to be a little bit more extreme than that so i'm going to turn down that size a little bit not too much because if i go really far like this far here obviously it's distorting the logo too much especially if i go back to where those lines are coming in you see how that red channel is really curving out i don't want to do that so i'm going to just keep that around maybe and that fringing might actually be enough as it is now just by stretching out that red channel to the outside edges it's basically losing the red color on the inside edges which is producing that teal color with the blue and the green channels added together but we're not really getting any fringing right here in the center of our frame or not quite as much as i'd like to see on this edge here if i turn that original source footage back on we can see that there's a pretty good separation between the white and the tealish color here and we even have some yellowish green halo around the inside edge of that too so i'm going to take a snapshot of this frame right here so that i can easily reference it and that will be my target for this frame right here so first of all everything looks a little bit more soft in the original so what i think i'll try is adding a fast box blur to the red channel and see if increasing the blurriness of that will help at all looks like that gives it a little bit more of a bleed around the entire edges of the frame which looks a little bit closer to the original i'll do the same thing just copy and paste that fast box blur to say the green channel but then turn down the amount so it's not quite so much and i'll copy that one more time and paste it to the blue channel as well all right that's getting closer i think one thing mine is missing is a little bit more of that haloy color so what i'm going to try is duplicating the blue channel and just removing the effects with ctrl shift e so we're left with just the clean white version of the logo again and i'm going to add a fast box blur to it it's still set to add and i'll increase that so we have this nice and glowy outside edge now we're losing a lot of that fringing around the outside edges because it's glowing on top of everything but if i move it below these three channels then we're going to get those colors showing through and i want to be sure to add the red channel as well now that we have something below it and just to make sure that all this is blending onto something and not just onto these transparent pixels i'm going to make a new solid layer and just make it pure black so make sure it's black click ok and call it background i'll move that to the bottom of the comp and lock it and then rename this halo now that is a pretty heavy halo that's probably way more than i need especially yeah if i look at the before and after i think it's a little bit more blurred out than it needs to be and it's definitely more intense than it needs to be so i'm going to open up the opacity with the t key on the keyboard and just dial that back so it's much more subtle even that's too much so i'm going to bring it down to maybe around 20 35 and that looks much closer so what i'm noticing is at the peak of this a on the reference footage there's a little bit more fringing than on my version so i think what i'm going to do to this and see what happens is just ever so slightly scale this out horizontally only so not a whole lot but just enough to bring that edge and that split out a bit more so now not only are we getting more red on the outside edges but it's even more pronounced because i stretched it out now that might have been a little bit too much so i'm going to press s on the keyboard to bring that value up hold down control and then just drag that back a little bit i don't want to overdo that stretching but i think that does make a bit of a difference there so let's take a look at this as a whole we've definitely got that rgb split it looks nice and soft like the original and everything is transitioning and animating exactly the same so i think we're nearing the end of recreating this logo there are just a couple things left that the original has which number one is this glowing spot in the background which almost looks like it's a projector in the back and if i turn up my composition's exposure you can really see it there and it looks like there's it was even getting cut off at this top and bottom part which is a little strange but you'd never notice that if you were looking at it the correct exposure so what i want to do to recreate this is very simple i'm just going to make a white solid and we'll just call it bright spot and we'll put that behind all of the actual logo but right above the background and add a mask so i'm going to go to the ellipse tool click and drag from the center while holding shift and control or command on a mac and just make a circle about that big and then i'll press f on the keyboard to bring up the mask feather and just feather this out about that much and then turn the brightness of this bright spot way down this is not a very noticeable bright spot on the original if we bring that up one more time you can see it come in right there and in fact i'm even going to use my eyedropper here and we're going to see what that value is so it's a brightness value of 3 it is barely brighter than black so i'm gonna shoot for that same brightness value of three percent which i bet you this is more yep it's four so we're going to take that opacity of this down to say three that should give us three percent brightness there we go and what i want to do is basically make it flicker and to do that i'm going to use just a very simple wiggle expression so hold alt or option on a mac click on that stopwatch and i'll type wiggle and then in between the parentheses i want it to wiggle let's say 12 times per second comma at a value of one percent i don't want it getting any brighter than four percent brightness in any darker than two percent so now my bright spot is flickering in the background there but what i need to do is find where it fades in on the original so let's turn that exposure way back up and it starts fading in around frame three so let's start at frame two we'll set a keyframe on that opacity and then go forward until that brightness is at its height which is about right here and we'll set another keyframe then change this one down to zero percent so zero percent opacity at the beginning and we'll easy ease into the keyframe just for good measure turn our exposure back off and hide that layer so now we can see that background fade in and start flickering but i'm going to call that good for now the other thing that the original has that mine doesn't is a little bit of dust and scratches if i find a frame right about there and just crank that exposure up a little bit more it's much more prominent you can see dust scratches little pieces of of hair so i'm going to recreate something like that very quickly using a turbulent noise effect so i'm going to make another black solid click okay and i'll call this dust and then i'll add the turbulent noise effect and i want to add a ton of contrast to this turn the brightness down and this is what's going to let us isolate just a few select portions of this texture and i want to change this property right here overflow from allow hdr results to clip i'm working at 8 bits per channel i don't need to worry about hdr so that should hopefully decrease the render time for this effect and i'm just going to play with the contrast and the brightness until i get very tiny specks all over the frame and again i can increase the exposure of my composition to make sure that i don't have any straggling pixels i just want to isolate these really crunchy sporadic pieces of the texture so that i can now go into my evolution options and go to the random seed property and just animate this value now as i do this i can see already that my dust is still too big so if i find a random frame that has a pretty sizable piece of dust like right there i'll go into my transform options and just turn the scale way down so now there's much smaller dust but there's more of it so i need to turn the brightness down to isolate that a little bit more and now if i go back into the random seed and just adjust it we have all these tiny little particles floating around now so what i want to do is add an expression on the random seed i'll hold alt or option on mac and click on that and then just type in the random expression and in between the parentheses i'm going to put 10 000. so this will generate a random value between 0 and 10 000 for every frame of my composition and now i have an animated dust texture now this might still be a little bit too much i think i'm going too heavy-handed with it so i'm going to bring that brightness down even further and now it's starting to really look like actual film dust so i think we're going to call that good for now i'll set this mode to screen so that all the black goes away and the white is all that's left i'm also going to move it below the effects layer which is just my blur but that way my dust has just an ever so slight amount of blur as well and if we take a look at this as a whole i think i've matched that dust value pretty closely to the original however i didn't posterize the time on this animation so it's happening at 24 frames a second instead of 18. so let's add that posterize time effect to the dust change that down to 18 and let's fade that in at the same time as that bright spot so i'm going to copy those two keyframes go to the dust layer and paste them so that they animate up at the same time i do need to remove the expression so i'm going to get rid of that and i need to modify that second keyframe to be 100 instead of 3 but now it will fade in with that bright spot we have all this dust floating around as the logo animates on it animates off and all that's left is for me to fade out that bright spot and the dust at the end so let's find the frames that the logo fades out again cranking up the exposure so i can really see it and it looks like right the last frame of the composition is where it goes to black so i'll find where it starts to fade out right about there and i'll set a keyframe on both the dust and the bright spot go to the last frame of the composition turn that down to zero turn this one down to zero and then ease out of these keyframes right here i don't really need to ease into the final keyframe so let's take a look awesome we're really close the only thing that's left here is that slight scale animation on the logo throughout the entire composition so what i'm going to do is just scale the whole thing up and i'm going to even just do that on top of my adjustment layer using a transform effect this is going to make a little bit of fuzziness around the edges of the frame because it's just taking what it has and scaling it up and down but this is already a very soft image and i'm going to do it pre the fastbox blur so i really don't think it's going to be an issue i'll bring the original logo to the top of my layer stack and unsolo it and then just turn down the opacity to say 50 percent so now i can see both overlaid on top of each other and what i want to do is just maybe go to right about here where this portion of the logo is visible in fact we can just keep this at 100 percent and i'll take a snapshot right there and turn the logo off so you can see the size difference in the scale there what i want to do is just grab that effect of transform go to the scale and scale this up ever so slightly so i can match that scale that's actually pretty dang close right there so i'm going to call that good and set a keyframe and then i'll turn that original source footage back on go forward in time to about here and again looking at the same part of the a i'm going to just take a snapshot turn that layer off and then use that scale of the transform effect down and compare that's a little too much so maybe it should be at about 100 percent that looks pretty good then i'll press u on the keyboard to bring up the keyframes and go into the graph editor what i want is for this scale to continue at the same velocity in both directions now i could use some expression to do this automatically and perfectly for me but really all i have to do is go to the start of my animation and just increase the scale until this line becomes straight so that the velocity or the change in value is consistent from here to here and that's pretty close so i'll go to the end of the composition i'll do the same thing this time scaling it down again just trying to make a nice consistent line through all of this and now i can just delete these two keyframes so i can be sure it's a consistent scaling through the whole thing and now the logo is scaling down as the whole thing plays out so now let's take a look at this as a whole side by side with the original logo so that is how i recreated the a24 logo animation and like i said it's a deceptively simple animation there are not that many things happening in terms of the actual shapes moving around it was just a lot of position and path keyframes and making some mattes out of either just track mats or using masks to hide different parts of the logo as it went away but it wasn't that complicated to build what makes it such a unique looking logo is that cool rgb post processing of offsetting those individual color channels to give it a unique look and also posterizing that time so that it looks just slightly lower frame rate than it should those little filmic effects like the dust and the chromatic aberration and even a little bit of softness and glow all these things added up together produce something that looks really unique there are probably some things in there that i could do to make it just a little bit better if you think that i did something wrong let me know and let me know if you have any better techniques than what i used but i really do hope that you try an exercise like this for yourself find an animation that you really like and try to recreate it in after effects frame by frame use that reference footage right inside of the composition so that you're trying to recreate it exactly the same and match all the colors match the timing of the spacing it's a really great exercise to teach yourself how something might be made i get asked all the time how do you animate blank and there's no secret formula to animating anything this may not be the way that the original logo was actually animated by the person who did it i just came up with a way that made sense to me for moving basic shape layers around keeping things aligned and then hiding and revealing them as i needed to every project has a different approach and using a project like this as an exercise is a really great way for you to just try stuff and see what works sometimes there are effects involved other times it's very subtle stuff like blurs and adding a little bit of chromatic aberration around the fringing of those edges to get something that looks really nice the point is you're getting into after effects and you're experimenting and trying new things there's nothing wrong with recreating somebody else's work obviously just don't go around telling people that you made that use it as an exercise for yourself if you show it off to somebody make sure that you're telling them you did not come up with this it was a recreation you were just doing it as an exercise do not i repeat do not put it on your demo reel don't put it in your portfolio you probably don't even want to post it to instagram unless you're blatantly putting a disclaimer that says this is not my work i just recreated it but the great part is that you've gotten better as an artist and as an after effects user because of the exercise which you can use to your own benefit to make your work in the future better let me know what you thought about this video in the comments and if you want to see more like it in the future drop some suggestions of what i might recreate or different challenges that you want to see me tackle inside of after effects i want to say a huge thank you to all of my patrons on patreon for the support that you're providing me to create these tutorials if you want to support more videos like this one then please consider becoming a patron you can check out the link in the description of this video thanks for watching and i'll see you in the next one

Channel: Jake In Motion

Views: 10,149

Keywords: After Effects, Animation, Motion Graphics, Mograph, Motion Design, Tutorial, Adobe, Adobe After Effects

Id: Dalmctq8UQo

Length: 47min 31sec (2851 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 27 2021