Figure 17.1: WWW17 Logo
Music:
Pentatonic er hu, pipa, gongs and flutes
Animation
Beijing was one of the easier logos to animate in that the organisers had some good ideas about what they would like to achieve to support the theme of the Conference One World One Web.
The downside is that all the drawings were as though they had been rendered with a charcoal pen. So we explored whether it would be possible to start with a curve consisting of 3 cubics, animate that and then add the charcoal effects last. Figure 17.2 shows what we were aiming at.
Figure 17.2: Charcoal Curves
We started with three simple cubics: the First tail, loop in centre and the second tail. Figure 17.3 shows how we split the original curve into an area by defining an outer and inner curve by displacing control points inside and out. That got us a cubic of 6 curves.
Figure 17.3: Thickening the Original 3 cubics into 6
Using our standard break_cubic transformation we split the cubics into two several times over (figure 17.4) using break_cubic.
Figure 17.4: Splitting Each Cubic
It was now possible to define a set of charcoal-like effects that we applied in a defined way to the curves to create the charcoal drawing effect (Figure 17.5).
Figure 17.5: Charcoal Effects
We now had a set of simple cubics to animate. But after the transformations, they looked like much more sophisticated curves. These we could now animate.
Figure 17.6: Animating the Curves
Given that the process was easy to define, we added it to the library as a standard function. Given a set of cubics, the offset curves could be defined and a set of effects applied. Below are some examples.
Figure 17.7: Animating Cubics
The original storyboard shown below was reproduced with little change in the final version.
Figure 17.8: Original Storyboard