My brother recently started a home renovation contracting service, Lawrence Welch Contracting, LLC. I created his logo, business cards, and flyers weeks ago, but now it’s time to start making them more interactive. I turned his logo into a logo stinger which adds some fun to his company and highlights a few of his contracting services. To start, I opened my Adobe Illustrator file with his company logo. I then created a new Illustrator file and labeled it separately. After copying the logo into the new file, I separated each logo component into individual layers. Previously, I made “thank you” notes for his company which incorporated a hammer graphic, so I included a new layer with the hammer graphic. Then, I downloaded a paint roller graphic from Canva.com to use in the animation.

With each component on individual layers, I switched over to Adobe AfterEffects and created a new composition. In this composition, I uploaded the Illustrator file as “Composition – Retain Layer Sizes” to ensure the file would open with individual layers instead of one merged image layer.

Lawrence Welch Contracting doesn’t offer roofing or roof replacement, but I wanted to incorporate a hammer or other tools somewhere in the animation. An off-kilter roof felt like a great opportunity to add some fun movement with tools. Three strikes with the hammer seemed sufficient for this particular logo animation. I recorded the sound of a hammer hitting roofing shingles I found in my garage for the added sound effect. In the initial animation, I didn’t animate a recoil motion after the hammer struck, but the audio recording created an audible second tap. I edited the animation to align with the sound of the hammer’s recoil.

The contracting service does provide interior and exterior painting, so the animation needed to feature the painting service. I started the paint roller graphic on the lower right-hand side of the logo and then started the roller movement after the last hammer strike. The roller moves across the screen underneath the logo, revealing the company name. I used a mask layer in AfterEffects that expands as the roller travels across the screen to create the reveal effect. The sound effect for this took multiple attempts. I painted across a plank of wood with a paint roller on the first attempt, but the audio mostly recorded thumping from the wood plank. With the second recording, I tried to flatten out wall texture spray, but the audio picked up too much background noise to edit out without erasing the sound of the texture. Finally, I tried pouring paint on an old cabinet door and rolling over it. The first roll didn’t pick up much noise, but later swipes led to the final audio used for the animation.

I also made the windows look out of place and animated them to change to normal windows but felt an additional sound effect would be too much noise in the animation.