Austin Saylor 2016 Demo Reel Intro

I put together my first demo reel . This is the intro to the reel (although in the reel it overlays the first scene).

How I made it:
I drew the lettering on my Wacom three separate times. I looped the three versions every 6 frames to give it some wobble. I also painted a colorful background with Kyle's watercolor brushes. And I have that colorful background changing every 4 frames or so... rotating 180º, then flipping horizontal, then vertical, then 180º again. The lettering is used as a matte layer for the color so that the letters appear to be made of the colors. And in Photoshop, I manually painted, frame by frame, a matte layer to animate on and off the letters and exported as transparent PNGs. Imported the PNG sequence into After Effects and set that as the matte layer over the "austin saylor" looped lettering. This was an experiment for me. I rather like how it turned out.

What I learned
I originally had the "austin saylor" animating on much slower... but it didn't work with the energy of the reel, so I time remapped it to be much faster. In the end it would have been faster to mask on the letters instead of painting a mask frame by frame in Photoshop because you can't even see the subtle strokes in the final result. However, the 2016 does have a nicer textured animate-on effect.