Maturing Logos
I’ve been sort of fleetingly consumed by motion graphics ever since I used an Apple IIe in the computer lab at my elementary school to program complicated LogoWriter operations to fill my screen with wildly flickering shapes and colors. I thought I’d share a quick history of my amateurish attempts at making a polished logo.
This one is something I cooked up to tag on the front of a video my friend Chris and I put together for our church years ago as an early teen. I had been inspired by a fellow that I met on a plane – he used the program Bryce to animate something while we chatted. I later tried my hand at it, and I turned out this super-jerky ride through a jagged canyon I modeled in the program. It’s a bit embarrassing to look at now, what with the jagged polygons where the land meets the water, and how the logo is backlit at the end, so it’s darkened by shadow. But it was a good first start, I think.
I made this hilariously pretentious logo to tag on the front of the (equally pretentious) student film I made at Waseda University. The assignment was to create an anthropological short. You can see my video here. I’m working on getting it split and re-uploaded to YouTube, which currently accepts videos up to 10 minutes long. For this logo and the next I used Adobe After Effects and a lot of spare time. Ha ha.
Here’s the latest logo that I’ve made. I designed it to be part of the ongoing Japan-related social web project JapanSoc.org – specifically JapanSoc.com. (JapanSoc.org is sort of a nebulous group of bloggers, whereas JapanSoc.com is a social voting site like Digg for Japan-related stuff. The video project is part of the latter, which is itself contributed to in large part by the former.) This was my first dip into HD. The logo was rendered in 720p High Definition, which means a resolution of 1280 x 720. Nice. Hopefully you’ll be seeing it at the front of a JapanSoc video soon!
