Brian, Scott and Jim, Thank You.

I’m in an in-house college marketing shop, wearing many hats as videographer and all things related including motion graphics. Am not an Ae power user….yet. Still, I have 9 years of Ae use under my belt. A short stint with Combustion before that. And a brief amount of Softimage 3D before that.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqoJEtM4jX0

My boss had seen the above clip from Simon Faser University and had read a report about it in some college-related national magazine. She wants me to push my envelope and incorporate more motion graphics such as those used in the clip. The story in the magazine was a write-up about how SFU had “pulled off this incredible thing in just two weeks.” Ha! I thought. She handed me the article and I read between the lines and interpreted the language of the article. A marketing director and the college pres had written the script, but “a Toronto-based graphics facilitator” had helped. Likely a boutique post house, unnamed in the article. Cost $10,000.00. Right. I informed my boss that the project hadn’t been done in house at all!....other than script. $10k for 4-mins of finished video is obviously heavy with AE and 3D animator time, not to mention the creative concepting and story boarding time. Possible ad agency involvement, but not mentioned in the article.

Motion graphics interspersed throughout the project.

That very first scene where the SFU logo follows a spline is what I was trying to achieve in Ae. Much of the other red-white animation looked like it could be done inside Ae, except for some of the objects that are 3D (maybe models imported to Ae.) Towards the end, there’s a train that’s obviously not 2D.

I pulled the video off youtube and have been going through the animations a frame at a time to see their progression…..as learning experience. The text animations seem like they came from somewhere else, or 3^rd party plugin. Or, they’re complex multi-comp projects with stroke animated. Not sure how the cross-hatching was applied. Complex. Not that I’m trying to duplicate, but I’d like to learn some of the steps so as to have the ability.

Any thoughts about how some of these motion effects were created, or whether within Ae or plugin would be appreciated.

John

If you use Freeform Pro applied to a large precomp, you should be able to Distort the layer/comp in any way you like, for example, following an s-shaped path. Then if you animate your layer inside the precomp, it will follow the distortions contained in the parent comp. Does this make sense?