Process & Learnings

After Effects is a program that I have used with varying consistency at different points in my design career. In college, when I was the lead designer for my university’s eSports teams, I would use the program weekly to edit team montages or social media videos. Nowadays, I will most likely open After Effects once every few months, and that’s being generous.

I went into this quick little project having a general idea of what I wanted the animation to be, and it would just be a matter of figuring out some masks and blending layers.

It ended up being a bit more than that.

(Read this portion if you care about After Effects)

I started by adding the original logo into the AE file, and my first step was to figure out how to “reveal” the transparent portions of the logo with key frames. My first plan was to add a filled circle over the logo, then add a third layer where I would trace the empty space with the pen tool to “fill in” the space. I then would update that stroke into a mask, punching out the correct parts of the circle, right?

For the life of me, I could not remember how to transfer one shape onto another as a mask. I tried copying the path, copying the shape, rasterizing the shape, the whole nine. I even got desperate and tried to use blending modes, which I now have discovered that blending modes do not work on a stroke. Good to know!

I then had a bit of an ah-ha moment, as well as a bit of an “are you kidding me” moment, I realized I had the wrong menu view toggled. I swapped over to the menu that allowed me to choose from the “Track Matte” options, and added an Alpha Matte of the stroke onto the circle’s layer. This successfully added the correct mask to the shape. From there, I used the Trim Path effect to keyframe out the mask, creating the animation. Success!

It was challenging yet fun to get back into the flow of problem solving on After Effects again, and this really showed me just how rusty I am. Hopefully the next project is a bit smoother now that I remember how masks work.

:D