Add text on a building

Adobe After Effects

Add text on a building

Posted by Christophe De backer on March 12, 2008 at 11:36 am

Hello

I’m a student film, but the school isn’t giving the support I need. For some reason the don’t think after Effects is worth teaching us. So I will learn it by myself.

I have a video where there is a building in it. That building has no company logo or name. I want to add this. But it has to be realistic. I tried it in photoshop, but it wasn’t realistic when I imported it to Final cut studio 2.

Somebody told me I should use AE for that. Problem is I have no idea how to get started on that. Is there a video tutorial or a text version that explains this step by step. I watched some of the video tutorials off creativecow but I don’t find what i’m looking for, never the less it helped me already a great deal those tutorials.

Thanks in advanced

Christophe De backer replied 18 years, 1 month ago 2 Members · 5 Replies
5 Replies

Simon Bonner
March 13, 2008 at 9:21 am

Hi Christophe,

It depends what elements you need.

Does the logo have to be “stuck” to the building in a moving shot? If so, you’ll have to get familiar with motion tracking (search in the help files – quite a big topic, but not so difficult to get started with).

Is your logo looking too artificial? Depending on what look you’re going for, you may need to colour correct it to match your shot (try applying the curves effect and changing the RG&B values independently). You could also try putting a grunge texture (like a photograph of some metal / stone) on top of the logo and setting the transfer mode to overlay, or play with other transfer modes. Or you could add some noise to the logo with the noise effect, so that it matches the grain of your footage.

Hard to say what else might help without an image from your project, but hope these help.

Simon Bonner

youtube.com/simonsaysFX
Christophe De backer
March 13, 2008 at 9:49 am

Thanks for the quick replay Simon.

A frame of the project is here: https://img30.picoodle.com/img/img30/4/3/13/f_Scne04Am_88315fb.jpg

It is a steady shot. The only movement is at the door. The gray bar above it, there I want the company name.

I tried the things you wrote to create a more realistic look, it looked indeed to artificial but when I imported the psd to FCP the text was black and the logo hardly visible.
I a banded the logo idea, for now I’m happy if I succeed in creating a believable company name on the building.

But I will try and try again until I succeed.

Christophe from Belgium
Simon Bonner
March 13, 2008 at 5:42 pm

Thanks for posting the image. It will obviously be difficult to get something that looks perfect, because the text will be very large on screen. But if you make your text 3D and then rotate it using the lines on the wall as a guide (then possibly adding some noise and a drop shadow to make it fit in with the footage), that could look good.

Good luck!

Simon Bonner

youtube.com/simonsaysFX
Christophe De backer
March 13, 2008 at 5:52 pm

I will try that this weekend. Thanks for the tip.

I believe I found a tutorial for 3D text in AE. Let’s see if I can manage that.

I post a result in a couple off day’s.

Christophe from Belgium
Christophe De backer
March 28, 2008 at 3:46 pm

I think I’ve got it.

It took me some time to figure out how to rotate stuff in EA.
But I think I did it.

I watched a lot off the creativecow video tutorials. Those are really a gift from the gods. Much better than when a teacher tries to explain stuff.

Here is a example of what I did with your tips Simon:

https://nl.youtube.com/watch?v=J2CLKkMUcNk

Christophe from Belgium

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