ProVideo Coalition.com: Creating Motion Graphics: Keyframes by Chris & Trish Meyer

One of the side effects of a 500 channel universe is the need to make a viewer stop when they surf to your channel, and get them excited about your lineup once they’re there. Strong promotional graphics is one tool to accomplish this. PAX TV was one of the many networks who redesigned their on-air look to try to cut above the noise (alas...).

We were sub-contracted by the Leprevost Corporation to execute Art Director Wendy Vanguard’s design for the primetime promo elements. The design brief was to give the impression of lots of radiating, prismatic light with a touch of mystery, along with motion and perspective. In this case, we relied heavily on lighting tricks using Electric Image, along with 3D animation of otherwise flat elements such as text.

In the figure at left, notice first that the large background “PAX” is not filled with a solid color, but has lighter and darker areas. The letters were created by again using Zaxwerks’ EPS Invigorator for Electric Image. The surfaces were given normal colors, but each letter was made semi-transparent, and lit by a set of spotlights that had narrow cones and soft, overlapping falloff regions. The letters unfolded onto the screen and then animated apart slowly, causing the stationary lights to seem to play across them. The 3D camera also rotates slightly up and around all of the elements, furthering the hint of 3D perspective.

Numerous component layers were rendered from Electric Image, each with the same camera animation so their moves and perspective were matched. These were then blended in After Effects with a variety of masks and transfer modes. In some cases, the elements (such as the slogans) were simple white letters or shapes, which were then used as mattes for other elements.

For example, the figure above and on the left is a frame of animated colored glass shards that were created by applying a shatter effect in 3D to a simple pyramid. It was then hit with a number of colored lights, some of which were also set to emit “volumetric” light rays when they hit the shards. The result was mixed behind the letters and slogans in the final image, using the light rays coming off the main letters as a partial matte. This same element was then blurred (the figure on the right) and used as a fill for the various copies of the slogan “share the wonder”.

The final composite is shown in below. This is an example of a graphic that would have been very hard to finish inside a 3D program: Virtually every element is colorized, faded, masked by a matte, or serves as a matte for another element, with all these parameters changing over time. The 36 individual elements take over 20 hours to render for a few second promo, but because they are mixed in a 2D program, client tweaks could take as little as a few minutes. In the end, the combination of a 3D and a 2D application is often the best approach to creating cool final graphics.

The final animation was composited in After Effects, which provided greater control over colorization, matting, and blending of the individual elements than could be achieved in a 3D program alone.