[Kevin Camp]

if you don’t have form, or want to do this without 3rd party plugins, I think you could do this with a mask, stroke and echo….

to get you started, simply create a new solid and draw a mask on it with the pen tool. add a keyframe for the mask path and then move down the timeline and move some mask vertices and repeat this process until you’ve have a short animated path.

to make the dots, add stroke, set the ‘paint style’ to ‘on transparent’ and increase the spacing to 100%. you should have a dotted line around your mask path. you can also keyframe the color property to change as needed.

then you can add the echo effect and increase the number of echoes to create the repeating effect. you probably want to set the echo operator to composite in back or front. adjusting the echo time will adjust the spacing in between the ‘echoes’

Kevin Camp
Art Director
KCPQ, KZJO & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

turbulent displace might do what you need…

try this: creative a new solid, add venetian blind and set the completion to 50% (this is just to create a line texture), then add turbulent displace and fiddle with the amount, size and displacement type.

–edit—

also, animating the evolution will make it ‘ripple’, or move in liquid-like way.

Kevin Camp
Art Director
KCPQ, KZJO & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

thisComp.numLayers will return the number of layers in the comp.

Kevin Camp
Art Director
KCPQ, KZJO & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

you can’t use an expression to control whether a layer is active or not (by clicking the eyeball icon for a layer to show/hide it), but you can control visibility via the opacity property.

so you can link a layer’s opacity to a slider, then set the opacity to 100 if the corresponding number is set by the slider or 0 if it is not. Something like this:
ctrl = thisComp.layer("control").effect("Slider Control")("Slider");
if ( Math.floor( ctrl ) == 1 ) 100 else 0;

Kevin Camp
Art Director
KCPQ, KZJO & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

you can show the ruler (view>show ruler) which can help in drawing the region of interest, then crop the comp, then go into the comp settings and make them exact…

Kevin Camp
Art Director
KCPQ, KZJO & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

i think you could do this relatively easily with text animators and a camera with depth of field enabled — enable per character 3D, set anchor grouping to ‘line’ or ‘word’, add a rotation animator, set the y rotation for the animator to 180, set advanced>shape to ‘ramp up’, enable random order and then animate the offset…

but since the logo is likely not text anymore, but vector shapes, it will be more tedious… you’ll need to separate each letter to it’s own layer and make them all 3D. Offset the anchor points on the y-axis of each layer with the ‘pan behind (anchor point) tool’ — in the tool bar, it’s just to the right of the camera tool. then animate the y rotations of the letters.

if you add a camera, enable depth of field and fiddle with the aperture and blur level, you should start to get something similar.

then you’ll just cross-fade between the first logo animation as it break up to the other as it comes together.

Kevin Camp
Art Director
KCPQ, KZJO & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

you might be able to use the difference matte effect… usually it does not produce an acceptable key, but in this case, since the keying would only be noticeable over the outlet, it might work. I’m also assuming that the camera is locked down and does not move.

first you’ll need to find the cleanest frame, best would be if you have a shot before the woman is in it and freeze frame it on a copy of that footage (or export the freeze frame as a PNG and import it back into the comp).

next you want to make a patch to cover the outlet, you can do this in photoshop or ae, it just needs to be a little larger than the outlet.

then i’d layer the comp like this

• footage layer with difference matte
• patch layer to cover outlet
• footage layer (without difference matte)
• freeze frame (to use with difference mate)

on the footage layer with difference matte, choose the freeze frame as the ‘difference layer’. this effect will try and remove the pixels from the footage that are the same as the freeze frame, thus producing a key. sounds perfect in theory, but in reality the key is often much less than perfect due to noise and compression artifacts. however, since you are laying the keyed footage over the original footage, you only need it to be acceptable as it passes over that small outlet. so you may be able to tweak the difference matte settings to get what you need.

Kevin Camp
Art Director
KCPQ, KZJO & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

assuming you are using cc2017 or later version of after effects, the ‘essential graphics’ panel might be what you are looking for. you can add all the text fields that need to be edited to the essential graphics panel.

Kevin Camp
Art Director
KCPQ, KZJO & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

nice job!

Kevin Camp
Art Director
KCPQ, KZJO & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

i still think i’d ty to work it out with particle systems… to have the particles rain down and hit the key as the it needs to be played, you’d offset the checkbox controls for the particle emitter/producer by as long as it takes for a particle to move from the top of the comp to the keyboard…. so if it takes a second for the particle to move, you’d offset the checkbox timing by one second. you could do that with valueAtTime().

chk = thisComp.layer("activeLeftHand").effect("22")("Checkbox");
offset = 1' // value in seconds
if ( chk.valueAtTime( time - offset ) == true ) 100 else 0;

also, once you know how fast the particle is moving and how far it needs to move to go from the top of the screen to the keyboard, you can create a custom particle that is the height that it needs to be if it moves one frame. ex: the particle moves 300 pixels in 30 frames, the particle should be about 10 pixels high.

with the height of the particle set, you can also calculate the minimum birthrate that is required to have one particle be released for every frame to make a continuous line, thus minimizing the number for particles required. using the previous example, the birthrate would be 30 per second, so the ‘100’ i used in the expression would change to 30.

Kevin Camp
Art Director
KCPQ, KZJO & KRCW