Animating my YouTube Intro - Motion Design Workflow Tutorial

In this video, I’ll show you how I animated my YouTube Intro in After Effects! I think a YouTube Intro shouldn’t be any longer than 5 seconds. It basically is a logo reveal. As my logo has a round shape, I wanted to use round shapes as main elements throughout the intro. Three shapes at the beginning open up the intro and reveal round shapes, that rotate around the centre. My workflow was to animate the shapes first. Therefore I used masks, a radial wipe and for some depth drop shadows. By the way, I use square solids (1920x1920 pixels) because if you then double-click on the ellipse tool, a perfectly round mask is created. Then I added footage on top of some of the shapes. Therefore I simply duplicated the shape and turned it into an Alpha Matte. Timing is very important for intros. In my case, there are two frames interrupting the beginning of my videos, then the intro takes up speed very fast and with the logo reveal it slows down again und smoothes out.