Preparing a News Open: Logo Touches

by Kurt Murphy, Paws For Effect, Amherst, New York USA ©2001 Kurt Murphy. All Rights Reserved. Used at CreativeCow.net by kind permission of the author. This edition ©2001 Creativecow.net. All rights reserved.

Article Focus: Join noted broadcast designer Kurt Murphy as he continues his exploration of the process of re-creating the on-air identity of a local broadcast affiliate in the Pacific Northwest area of the United States. In part seven of the series, Kurt adds a few touches to the logo -- a blur, a lens flare, a drop shadow -- little touches added to 'fine tune' the look.

Invigorator didn’t (yet) contain a motion blur within the plug-in, so a slight Blur was added over time as the logo settles (see below). A Lens Flare was added on the logo as it landed. A Drop Shadow was also added which changed in opacity, distance and feather as it came closer to the background. figure 33 Both the KVEW and KAPP Quicktime movies were rendered to last about 2 seconds, even though both would be needed for much longer durations after they landed into position. By selecting Enable Time Remapping for the movie layer (Command-Option-T, fig. 33), it extends the movie to last the length of the comp, essentially adding a ‘hold’ keyframe for the last frame. I wanted to add a highlight that moved across the edges of the logo after it landed into position. I created a highlight pattern (fig. 34) using Kai’s Power Tools 3.0 for Photoshop (unfortunately later versions of this plug-in sort of suck). This highlight image was placed over the logo, and rotated slowly over time. An Add Transfer Mode knocked out the black, leaving only the highlights (fig. 35). figure 34 figure 36 Invigorator lets you render various facets of an object (fig. 36). Here I rendered a frame of the edge information after it had landed into place (fig. 37). This is used as a Trackmatte for the rotating highlight layer which means that the highlights only appear within those edge lines. The highlight layer was dissolved in after the logo settled into position (fig. 38). Want to see the whole series so far? Would you like to view the movie? Coming soon ... Part eight: "Basic Text".

©2001 Kurt Murphy. All Rights Reserved. Used at CreativeCow.net by kind permission of the author.
This edition ©2001 Creativecow.net. All rights reserved.

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