After Effects" Animate Masks

I like using real life effects with my effects – so when I wanted to jazz up the sun – adding a sunrise to this logo, I just happened to have some beautiful sunrise footage from Gulf Shores – beautiful. I actually named my clip ‘liquefy’ because you could practically see the sun melting into the gulf as it was rising above it.

It turned into an interesting blend of odd tools because starting with my ‘Real sun’ meant calming it down with Mocha tracking. I’m still cutting my teeth on Mocha but basically, you describe the shape you want to stabilize, track it, check the stability as you go and once you are comfortable with the tracking, export your tracking data, paste into After Effects. The only caveats I encountered is, you can track position, scale, rotation, and shear and in this case, a fairly straight ahead view of sun that simply bobbed with my handle. The ‘stabilization’ required I paste these new tracking points against the anchor point in AE.

Once you have a stable sunrise, apply a mask in a copy of your composition. If you try to mask your movie, the mask will jump around with the adjusted anchor too – I applied a mask on a solid layer in same comp to see it work – to see movie for masking application, on new solid to see it remain in place.

To bring in a masked alpha image however, you need to create comp from this one, then copy mask over to this new comp that is … a composite of all the elements so far. It sounds a bit complicated, there may be a simpler way but you end up with stabilized, masked composition that you can apply to your ‘real’ job, the logo you are creating, and there

start having more fun. Like applying some sunlike flare and brilliant light … from Knoll light factory. I know of no better way but to experiment a bit, and that’s exactly what I did. I found a ‘desert sun’ flare that blended quite nicely as I let my ‘real Sun’, melt with Knoll flare, into the Illustrator sun logo.

A little bit of work, quite a bit of Fun!