Masters of Facial Plastic Surgery 2021 Virtual Meeting

After my success creating an animated intro to unify dozens of individually-submitted medical presentation videos under a single brand for the virtual 2020 AAFPRS Annual Meeting, I was excited to replicate the process for their Masters of Facial Plastic Surgery meeting, held once again online in May 2021!

This tale is much the same as that from the fall: animate an intro that could be customized for every video presentation (this time, 106 of them!), work that into a Premiere sequence for each video, fix any glitches, render and upload to the conference Dropbox. I once again started with a given Photoshop file of the pre-existing conference design language:

Modifying this original in Photoshop, I laid out the pieces with an eye specifically towards how I’d later animate them together in After Effects:

After building from my AAFPRS Academy logo animation much as I had in the Fall 2020 animation, I rigged my modified Photoshop design to integrate much like it does in the final product. After bouncing a few rounds of notes back and forth with AAFPRS, I arrived at the master comp you see below:

Just like in the fall, I took care to make sure the animation wouldn’t break, no matter how long or short the presentation titles or presenter names got—I’d have to duplicate the animation out over a hundred times, type each video’s info into its comp, and shift the words around a little to look aesthetically pleasing, so I couldn’t be worrying about adjusting masks to compensate in that phase.

And just as before, each animation was rendered with an alpha channel, brought into Premiere, and incorporated into an easy-to-duplicate sequence structure that included a bottom bar for the conference title and speaker’s name, a background design for any presentations that weren’t full widescreen (I’d mask their edges out), and an adjustment layer to blur all of the above as the “NO RECORDING” warning played out at the end of the intro animation.

With final approval from AAFPRS on one such video as a template, I scaled this process out to the full 106 videos, corrected a/v sync and hard-to-hear audio tracks as needed, and had all the videos up on the server in time for the virtual conference to go off without a hitch. I was definitely only able to process this many videos in such a short time frame (right as I was, you know, graduating college too!) because I was building and improving upon my first stab at this kind of work in the Fall of 2020. I’m looking forward to it going even smoother for this Fall’s upcoming Annual AAFPRS Meeting, as well!