Now that I have decided on my logo and its' colours, I wanted to quickly explore the realm of moving digital visual effects, motion graphics, and logo animation using Abobe Aftereffect.

Since this is my first time using Aftereffect, my main focus will be learning the basics of this software, getting myself familiar with navigating the tools and hopefully by the end of it producing a nice motion graphic for my logo.

My learning of Aftereffect began on youtube, my favourite place for learning new software. I spend quite a lot of time looking through beginner tutorials, and this video by Ben Marriott is one of the best tutorials on youtube for those hoping to understand the basics of how aftereffect works;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hb2bbfiNBXA&t=189s&ab_channel=BenMarriott

( source link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hb2bbfiNBXA&t=189s&ab_channel=BenMarriott)

After I got more familiar with Aftereffects, it was time to decide what sort of moving effect I wanted to add to my logo. There were a few possible effects that I had on my mind. The first one was the raindrop effect( making the logo look like glass and have water running down it), the next was a very cool light effect in which a trail of light traces the logo, and the last one was the gradient effect ( changing/moving  gradient in the logo background)

By now, I have realised that animating my logo will be very time-consuming, especially for someone like me who has just started to grasp its concepts. Thus I know that I must choose carefully what effect I want since I know that there will not be enough time to experiment with all the different cool effects.

In the end, I chose the gradient effect for my logo, this is because my logo and my brand overall are very colourful. I think making use of the 3 colours in my logo and having them move around the background would be very fitting for my brand.

I have to give credit to the following video by Oliver Randorff, I followed his tutorial step by step to create and applied his techniques to my logo to create the final product;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIJ0l9nNE3g&t=275s&ab_channel=OliverRandorff

( source link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIJ0l9nNE3g&t=275s&ab_channel=OliverRandorff )

So first I imported my logo into Aftereffect, I had to learn how to import my art in an acceptable vector form so that I can change its colour and size in Aftereffects;

Next, I gave my logo a light base colour. This is the colour that will be in the background of my gradient, thus it needs to be a light colour. If the colour is too dark it might show through my gradient;

Next, we come to the most time-consuming part. I had to create multiple circles of different sizes and different colours ( but only using the three main colours of my logo). Afterwards, I had to animate each individual circle by setting the rotation effect to "Time  x random degree of rotation" so that each circle would rotate randomly in the background;

The screenshot above showed the mistake I made during my first attempt. As my circles were so small and didn't cover the whole logo, afterwards when I aminated the circles and confined them to the boundaries of my logo, a lot of background space was shown because as the circles randomly moved about there were gaps;