MTV Ident

Here's an MTV Ident me and Ross made as part of our work related project.
The animation took around about 6 hours in total to complete. We wanted to go for something that looked great but was still fairly simple to create so that we could manage our time better.

The first stage was finding a good background to work with, and Ross came across this great image which has a lot of perspective and depth, making it easier to composite 3D objects within the scene.

Next we set up the lighting and ran some basic compositing tests using a cube as a reference. 

We came up with the idea of having the MTV logo come in from over the top of the buildings as it gives quite a dramatic impact and introduction to the logo. However we also wanted the sky to move across slowly, so that the still image looked more alive. This meant we had to remove the sky in Photoshop, and replace it with a green screen for further editing in After Effects. Once the main animation was completed which was done through using Nitro 4D's plugin Thrausi: http://nitro4d.com/blog/donationware/thrausi/, we then thought it would look cool if there were parts lying on the floor such as rubble and bricks that floated off the ground as the MTV logo came in, which gave it quite a supernatural feel. This was a struggle to achieve because we had to figure out an easy way of lifting each object off the floor without doing it manually. The best way to do this was through using dynamics, and to give it more intensity, we used the "Vibrate" tag in order to add a slight vibration to each of the objects as they lift up. 

The next stage was all done in After Effects. We started off by keying out the green screen, and placing the sky in behind the logo's pieces. Next we did some basic colour correction through altering the curves attributes on an adjustment layer, and adding a vignette to give a little more depth to the scene. We played around with the hue on the sky so that it matched the rest of the scene, and then added some simple camera shakes. Finally we imported the rendered animation into Final Cut for adding the sound track (Hybrid Minds - Summer Rain), and syncing it with the logo's movements. 

I personally had already attempted an MTV Ident previous to this using similar techniques so I had an idea of how I thought it could look, and the direction we could take it in, as well as knowing our limits for what we should and shouldn't do. Ross was on the same wave length as I, so working along side him was very easy for both of us.