SNDBOX THUMBNAIL COMPETITION | My entry And A Breakdown Of How I Animated It

For this competition I decided to make an animated gif using Adobe After Effects. I really like Hive account@sndbox's branding and style and wanted to stay on brand as much as possible so I decided to look through some of the previous posts Hive account@sndbox had made to get some inspiration.

• Once I had found a few Ideas I went ahead and made the background gradient by color-picking the 2 blues from this graphic below.
  

• I then needed the @Sndbox logo. I couldn't find a decent high-res version in any of the Hive account@sndbox posts but I managed to grab it from https://steemwhales.com/sndbox.
  

• Taking inspiration from the Hive account@sndbox graphic above I decided to incorporate a peppering of random shapes. To make the shapes change as they are gently falling I first creating a separate 8 second composition at 200x200px and added the 4 different shape layers.
  

• I then added the random shape composition to a 3rd party plugin called Trapcode Particular and used it as a texture polygon. To get the particles falling behind the text as well as in front I duplicated the particle layer I just made and moved the second layer to the back. I also added a slight glow to both of the particle layers.
  

• I chose a font that was in keeping with the Hive account@sndbox branding and gave each character a different colored stroke.
  

• Here are all the layers I used for this animation.
  

• Finally to get it to loop I created a new composition and dropped in the finished animation. I split it in half and moved one of the end points to the end of the comp and moved the other half of the end to the beginning and faded one layer into the other. This way the gif seamlessly loops.
  

Well I thoroughly enjoyed making this thumbnail and pretty happy at the way it turned out. I hope you all like it to. Thanks for giving us all the opportunity to participate in this competition. Look forward to seeing all the other entries.

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