National Geographic 3 -- OUAN406

The hardest scene to make in my National Goegraphic ident was the one where the logo appears partially obscured by trees. I didnt want to have to hand paint a mask around the branches for every single frame, so in order to have the trees look as close as possible to the original I had to employ some Adobe wizardry.

First I made the original footage black and white in After Effects, and also ramped up the contrast to make the sky white and the foreground black.

The effect wasn't quite strong enough so I exported the clip as PNG images, and with Photoshop batch processed them into Bitmap PNGs. When I reimported the sequence in after effects it was ready to use as a mask layer.

This could then be applied over the top of the original footage with all the white areas automatically knocked out, leaving me with the desired effect.

I added a very gentle pan to the rectangle object, in the opposite direction that the trees are moving, to give the impression that the camera is rotating around the logo, and used the After Effects "Color Change" to make the logo look like it was being illuminated by the same light source as the trees.

Final Result: