Production: Making the Ident

Below are a couple of screenshots whilst I was making the ident for our film. I made it using After Effects CS6 with the use of two external plugins: Trapcode Particular (for the smoke) and Trapcode Lux (for the beam on the light).

Here is the finished product from that:

I then decided that the ident would also need sound. I used the exported video (above) and transferred it over to my Mac.

I then opened up Logic and Imported the video file.

I, first, wanted to add a sound for the smokey effect at the beginning of the ident. I used a white noise filter and played around with it (I made use of the stereo audio field and panned the smoke sound to make it sound as if it were coming from both left and right - as it does in the video).

I then used some of the loops from the Apple Loops Browser and looked under the 'Texture' category and found some sounds loops that worked well together (some of the 'Evolving Atmosphere' loops). I also played around with these sounds and added them in as the lights come on.

I then bounced (exported) the audio and moved it over to my Windows PC. I opened up the After Effects project and put imported the sound file and placed it where it needed to be.

Finally, I exported the video.

Here is the finished product (this version, video and audio, has been compressed but will be in full quality for the actual movie):