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Completed 2020
3D Cinematic Logo Remake
Client: Legacy Vision Media, for Empower the Planet
A remake of the 20th Century Fox logo, this version adopts a more cartoony look and was used in the opening titles of season 2 of David Lockhart’s Empower the Planet.
I spent many hours scrubbing back and forth in the original logo to give myself the best understanding of it’s 3D structure. I then began the modelling process, trying to incorporate as much detail as possible into the structure itself and it’s surrounding scenery.
All of the 3D work was done within Autodesk’s 3ds Max. I then rendered out several layers separately to maintain significant levels of flexibility when it came to compositing them all together. I used Adobe’s After Effects to composite the layers as well as apply post effects like a colour grade and lens flares.
On a fundamental level, this project would fail at the first hurdle if audiences weren’t able to recognise the original source material that this was parodying. To make sure that this did not happen, I watched the original logo as well as other faithful recreations of it over the course of many, many hours. I then spent many more hours modelling it within 3ds Max, being careful to stick to the correct proportions and animations, all the way down to the speed and angle at which the spotlights moved.
As this project took about 40 hours to render (I decided to boldly go ahead alone without the help – and expense – of a render farm, using just my machine) it was critical to make sure that what came out of the infinitely long render was actually useful. The trick to this was to maintain some flexibility so that, even after the initial render had occurred, I was able to tweak and make adjustments to separate parts of the image. I did this by rendering out each part of the sequence separately – so rendering out the light beams separately to the main ‘Empower the Planet’ structure and so on. Having separate layers gave a huge amount of flexibility when it came to compositing in After Effects – even allowing me to eventually create special festive versions of the logo without having to touch 3ds Max!
