FakeOut Nation came to me looking for an animated logo introduction. They had a rough idea for what they wanted and told me they would like it to have a spooky theme which opens up on a graveyard and then have a flash of lightning to reveal the logo. They also sent me a few variations of their logo to choose from and use.

I started by coming up with ideas for the animation and putting a storyboard together. I came up with the idea of having the eye's of the logo rise up to the sky as the lightning strike hits the ground. Then after this have the eyes decrease in size and have the rest of the logo animate on around them.

Before starting on anything I looked through the teams previous branding on their social media pages and their website. From this I found that they stick to a dark colour scheme with their main colours being a dark and a light purple along with black. Also before starting on anything I had to go into the logo's ai file and separate each element so I would be able to have full control when it comes to animating.

Here you can see each separate layer. 

After all this was done I then went on to design the graveyard scene which I already had an idea for from the storyboards I created. I made sure to create something that would fit well with their spooky theme that they wanted. While designing it I again made sure everything was a separate layer so I would be able to add in the little details of the crow pecking at the cross and the bats moving.

I left all the extra details like the grass and the moon to do once I had brought the ai file into after effects. Once I had brought everything in I created the background along with the sky which I made sure stuck to their purple colour scheme. I then also used the mesh warp effect to place a vector grass image along the hills. 

Once all this was completed I was ready to begin animating everything. I placed each layer of the graveyard scene in 3D space and then used a null object to control a camera that animates through everything. I felt that the slow dolly of the camera worked as a good build up to the lightning strike.

Then for the text animation I wanted to come up with something that looked clean and professional and decided to go with a write on effect. Other animations like the particle explosion then help sell this look. To achieve this effect I used shape layers and trim paths to create a matte that could be used to reveal the letter.

I then did this for each letter and combined them all together.

To then create the final look I duplicated these with different colours and placed them in my timeline so that they had a slight offset.

After all this was done the final thing I had to do was add the sound design. While doing so I wanted to stick with the spooky theme so chose to go with spooky ambient sound effects to go along with the powerful sound of the lightning strike. 

The client also asked for a shortened version as they felt it was too long to open up their YouTube videos. I cut down the length and adjusted some elements such as the sound to fit and sent this along with the long version.

Overall I had a lot of fun working with FakeOut Nation on this project. They were very easy to work with and allowed for a lot of creative freedom which allowed me to experiment and come up with an overall epic but professional final looking product.