To help improve my skills I decided to take part in a quick competition. The brief was to create a small ten second ident for Creative Networks which would play in front of video presentations that they use. The deadline was very close when I started the competition, however I had an idea coming into it and I knew it would not take long to complete.
I took part in this brief as I thought it would interesting to work on animation that isn't about characters. I also wanted to work more on my After effects skills and this competition would provide a good opportunity to do so.
I created the initial animation using Flash. As I am used to working in Flash often this didn't take too long to do. I had been watching tutorials on how Flash's SWF files can interact with After effects and I thought that using Vectors would be useful for upscaling the footage to 1080p. The animation took about a day to complete.
I created SWF's showing each individual asset then imported them into After effects. By continually rasterising the assets I was able to maintain a clear image when upscaled to double size. I was going to render this out as it was, however, when the logo moved backwards there was an odd graphical glitch due to the motion tweens that I used.
After many attempts to fix it I eventually opted to create a PNG sequence in the Flash file. This would give me less freedom to change things in editing but eliminated the graphical glitches present.
Once I had rendered the image sequence out in After effects I put the file into Final cut for some final adjustments. I added some music to the composition and a fade out at the end of the footage. The music I added I don't think suited very well with the brief but I struggled to find anything more suitable for the ident.
While the competition specified that the footage be sent by email, my footage exceeded the size limit to be sent, so I instead uploaded it to Vimeo. i have yet to receive anything back from the hosts however I feel this was a useful experience for me and a good test of my skills.
