This piece of work is one of my favorites. For one thing, I love doing media for Youth Camp…. especially for my very own youth camp in North Georgia. I was very (surprised) honored when my friend Phillip Medlin down in Atlanta called me that night and asked if I could do some animating on a logo the state office had gotten designed. So here is that back story. Hope everyone in GA enjoys. I’ll try to keep it not-so-much technical and more realistic…. I mean short.
So here is the original design I was sent….
I had to keep the original design as much as I can. So that is no problem. I actually do like the swirl in the back.
So the first thing I had to do is to separate the swirl from the rest of the picture. Easy enough since both sides are identical and one side doesn’t have anything meshing with it. Then I just had to guess the font. Being on a mac this was kinda hard to do. However, I thought to myself, “This was probably done on a windows.” So, my first guess was the default font for Windows XP…. Arial!
My next step was to trace the paths of the swirl and export it to Illustrator. From there I finally was able to get into my program of choice, Cinema4D.
After editing the spline points, extruding and adding text (also extruding) and a few other polishing tasks I had a wire-frame draft of the 3D version of the logo.
You would think the hard part was done, but this hour of work was only the beginning! What did I have left to do? Well, since this wasn’t just a still logo reconditioning, I had some animating to do. You would think that a 5-10 second animation wouldn’t be that much work for just a few objects. But believe me, I only got the basic animation how it was going to be after about 4 days of work.
So, after a few more days of getting the materials (colors) on everything and adding a little glass here is the final product and a few of the stills we used for print and other places.
Hope you enjoyed this first look into my workflow. And if you have a flat logo you would like me to work on, I am still young and cheap. Let me know if you have anything you want turned into a good graphic or animation!
Next Week, I will unveil the concepts the client didn’t like. But the draft renders might inspire mine or your next project!
HINT: Cloth