Bar animation help, example attached.

[Nick Haffie-emslie]

Could you post what you have so far?
Then we can give you feedback on what you need to tweak (no sense going through a bunch of stuff that you already have right – best to focus on what’s not quite there)

[George Smith]

Hi Nick,

Yes that would have been the smart thing to do, but I never kept what I was doing because I was so frustrated and it looked so rubbish!

I’m about 6 hours away from my deadline now, so I’ve be searching for some stock-background video to replace it with a similar look – but again no luck.

The video is a hype up video and to be honest, I’m really disappointed with it – I’ve had 3 days to edit a review of they year with photos and music. I’ve done the type like LED lights, and I was hoping a reflection and the above background might save it – but I haven’t been able to manage either!

(I couldn’t do the reflection with or without a plugin (zaxwerks) as everything flys in behind camera.

Any last ideas on blue bars would be very much appricated.

Thanks again.

George.

[Steve Renard]

You should be able to do a reflection of the bars by duplicating the elements and using expressions to move them in relation to the originals. Or, a simpler way to do it is to do the animation on the bars then pre-comp them, then make that comp a 3D layer and rotate it into the position that you want. I’m just talking through this as I think about it and haven’t tried it, but that should work. I’ve used the expression route before with great results, though, and I’ve also had luck with parenting for reflections, but only when the object is a fixed distance away from the reflective surface.

Good luck,
Steve

[George Smith]

Thanks for the reply Steve. I’ll investigate expressions now. Never thought of that!

Now I just need to tackle the background animation so I can go to bed! Ha ha.

[Nick Haffie-emslie]

In terms of off-the-cuff tips:

– go heavy on gradients when making your bars (notice how the bars in the sample there often fall off completely to black on one edge)
– add the shiny glows that travel along the bars by making a separate layer (just a shape layer, or draw a mask on a solid) in the shape of the glows, blur them out (or feather the masks) and set transfer mode to Add. Maybe toss a glow effect on there (actually, throw a glow on an adjustment layer for the whole comp). Animate them travelling down the edge of the bars.
– for the reflection: precomp everything together – bars, text, logos, whatever – everything that you want to appear to be flat against the bars. We’ll call this comp with everything in it Comp A. Bring Comp A into a new comp and duplicate it (one of them is going to be the bars, one is going to be the reflection). Flip the reflection one by setting Y scale to -100% (leave X scale at 100% though). Drop the opacity on the reflection layer to like 50%, and put a mask on it, feathered, so that it falls off into darkness as you get lower.

[George Smith]

thanks for the tips. I’ll see how I go! I hope I get it right!