AAFPRS Logo Animation

At the onset of my work for the American Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery (AAFPRS), I knew I needed to animate their logo before stepping into anything else. All I had to go off was this fuzzy, background-baked-in PNG:

I could’ve selected for black in Photoshop, or keyed it out in After Effects, but the remaining pixels would’ve been bloated and stagnant and that’s no fun. So first, I ran the logo through Image Tracing in Illustrator:

In After Effects, I broke the new vector AI file into the various components of the logo I wanted to manipulate, such as the face outline highlighted below. Using the Stroke effect, I had After Effects draw the path for me as a 3D camera pulled away, resulting in the opening moments of the animation. The rest of the logo build works from more straightforward masking and position keyframing.

That’s all there was to this build! I’ve worked the entire piece, as a single composition, into other animations for AAFPRS since, which have led to these alternate versions:

Other than changing the background color value, this just involved changing that of a cover-up shape cut out of the right side of the facial outline that covers the words FACIAL PLASTIC SURGERY as they slide out from underneath—this shape vanishes as the logo becomes still, so animating underneath the final result in specific videos is easy after that point.