Revealing the Logo in Stripes


Your video cube uses a company logo for its top and bottom sides, but the videos in the cube sides get the most exposure as the cube whirls and spins. To give the logo the attention it deserves, you'll put it in the spotlight near the end of the animation and fully reveal it as the cube explodes in the background. To do so, you'll create a unique reveal for the logo by animating a bunch of solids in the shape of vertical stripes. Then you'll use the solids as a track matte for the logo so only strips of the logo appear wherever a solid's invisible stripe appears:

1.

Create a new composition named Line Wipe using the NTSC D1 Square Pix, 720x540 composition preset, with Duration 15;00 seconds.

2.

Create a white (RGB: 255, 255, 255) Solid layer starting at time 0;00 in the Line Wipe Timeline, with Height 540 (the same as the Main comp) and Width 172.

3.

With the Solid layer selected in the Timeline, press Enter or Return and type Square 1.

4.

Duplicate the Solid layer nine times so you have ten copies total. The new layers are automatically renamed Square 2, Square 3, and so on (new in After Effects 6.5).

Note

If you had duplicated the layer without first changing the layer name in the Timeline, the names of the new layers wouldn't be automatically renumbered as they are in the previous step. That's because the name you set in the Solid Footage Settings dialog is actually the Source Name, which appears in the Project window and the Timeline's Source Name column.

5.

To change the width of the new Solid layers, select a layer in the Timeline and press Ctrl (Windows) or Command (Mac OS) and Shift+Y to open the Solid Footage Settings dialog. Set the Width of the new Solid layers as follows:

Square layers 10 and 9: 20

Square layers 8 and 7: 100

Square layers 6 and 5: 50

Square 4: 120

Square 3: 35

Square 2: 65

6.

Select all the layers, and press P to display their Position properties.

7.

Add a Position keyframe at time 0;00 to all the layers.

8.

Deselect the layers, and scrub only the X value (the first value) of each layer's Position property so every layer is offscreen with some to the left and some to the right of the composition area. You want the value for each layer to be unique from the other layers so the solids come in seemingly randomly after you set their landing Position keyframe in the next step.

These are the Position values used for this chapter's finished project movie:

Square 10: -18, 270

Square 5: 750, 270

Square 9: 740, 270

Square 4: -68, 270

Square 8: -56, 270

Square 3: -22, 270

Square 7: 776, 270

Square 2: 752, 270

Square 6: -38, 270

Square 1: 806, 270


9.

Go to time 2;00, and change the X value of each layer's Position property so that the white blocks line up edge to edge (in no particular order) and fill the entire Comp window. Make sure you see nothing but white across the whole screen.

These are the Position values for the layers at time 2;00 in the chapter's finished project's movie:

Square 10: 562

Square 5: 140

Square 9: 10

Square 4: 492

Square 8: 670

Square 3: 182

Square 7: 66

Square 2: 230

Square 6: 596

Square 1: 348


10.

Choose Window > The Wiggler to display that palette.

11.

Click the Position property name of the Square 1 layer, and set the following values in The Wiggler palette:

Apply to: Spatial Path

Noise Type: Jagged

Dimension: One Dimension X

Frequency: 5

Magnitude: 500

If you play back the animation, that block moves more frenetically across the screen.

12.

Select the Position property name of the next layer in the Timeline, and click Apply in The Wiggler palette.

13.

Repeat step 12 for the rest of the Solid layers.

The Solid layers slide in horizontally to fill the composition with white color.

When you play back the animation, all the blocks move across the screen more madly than before you applied the Wiggler. The layers stop after 2 seconds and fill the screen with white color.

Adding the logo

To reveal the logo as animated stripes, you'll use the Line Wipe composition as the logo's track matte. As a result, the solids in the Line Wipe comp won't be visible, and the logo will only appear through the animated shapes of the solids:

1.

Open the Main composition, and close any other open compositions.

2.

Go to time 10;25, and add the Line Wipe composition to the top of the Main Timeline's layer stack.

3.

Add the a2d_designlogo.ai file below the Line Wipe composition in the Timeline.

4.

Set the a2d_designlogo layer's Scale to 145, 145% to enlarge it.

5.

Set the a2d_designlogo layer's Track Matte to Alpha Matte "Line Wipe" in the Timeline's Modes column. The Line Wipe layer now reveals the logo when it plays.

Strips of the logo appear wherever an invisible solid overlaps the logo.



    Adobe After Effects 6.5 Magic
    Adobe After Effects 6.5 Magic
    ISBN: 0321267230
    EAN: 2147483647
    Year: 2005
    Pages: 236

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