New After Effects Template: Jungle Temple – Overgrown Temple Logo Stinger

Jungle Temple After Effects Template

Lush vegetation, vivid colors and nature all over. Jungle Temple is one of those After Effects templates that scream “Adventure!”. Whether you are a Tomb Raider or an Indiana Jones fan, Jungle Temple is perfect for those engaging gaming YouTube channel intros or for your short or feature film!

This is an AE template that presented a lot of technical challenges, since I wanted the text to look wickedly cool and realistic, but still remain editable. Now, you might be surprised, but the theme for this After Effects Template was not really Tomb Rider nor Indiana Jones, it was Angkor Wat; a beautiful temple complex in Cambodia. The temple today is covered in vegetation and is a well know landmark that has been showcased in numerous films and I came across a bunch of photos of it doing some research for a different project and fell in love with the exquisite textures and imagery.
This template went through several iterations, including one with a pyramid and a stone Buddha face. But somehow none of them could carry across the message I wanted to convey in this  template. In the end I went with a minimalist approach for the overall design, splashed with a dash of detail in the textures, adding the complexity back into the stone text and the grass patches growing out of it.

The music was also an interesting journey. Since Cambodia is situated in Asia, I added a Tibetan flute and ethnic drums combined with chourus-y chants to make it sound like some sort of Buddhist monastery, but at the same time I wanted it to sound like something stereotypically out of a jungle. The result was an interesting marriage between ancient ruins and the green wilderness.

Hit the break to watch a video of the AE template in action!

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New After Effects template: Spiral Galaxy Logo Stinger

After Effects template: Spital Galaxy

After the unimaginably small, the unimaginably big! What am I talking about? Outer space, of course. Spiral Galaxy is one of those After Effects templates that I’ve been waiting forever to release. First of all because I love astronomy and celestial bodies, but second, because I’ve been working on this template for a very long time. I just couldn’t get it right! I have tried just about every single trick in the book and tried to create this effect through different methods, but every single time, it somehow managed to look terrible. Until I decided to just go with an actual particle system and use the forces of nature at play in an actual galaxy like rotation and gravity.
Colorization wasn’t an easy feat either,  in this After Effects template, I wanted people to be able to colorize the galaxy just the way they wanted, so I had to layer it and use plugin upon plugin, stacked on top of each other to create a vibrant color scheme that looks good.
This After Effects template does not require any third party plugins, as everything is pre-rendered and ready to use, even the 3D text. All you have to do is customize it with your own color scheme and voila!

Hit the jump to watch it in action.

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New After Effects Templates and Motion Graphics Portfolio!

A quick update for those of you following my After Effects Templates and Motion Graphics work and my micro-stock work, I just recently created a brand new micro-stock portfolio at the site MotionElements.com. For those of you who don’t use Pond5 nor VideoBlocks to aquire stock footage/sound, Motion Graphics and After Effects templates, there is now … Read more

After Effects Templates: Pre-Made Motion Graphics Are Not a Crime!

I often found myself wondering… Should I or shouldn’t I make After Effects templates? Why on Earth would anyone buy pre-made motion graphics? You know? I actually thought templates were sort of a waste of money to buy and a waste of time to make. But after making a few myself in my spare time, … Read more

Why Are Motion Graphics So Expensive?

Why are motion graphics so expensive?

As a motion designer, I often hear many of my customers and potential customers ask me why is this stuff so expensive? And I used to get really annoyed at that question, because for me it is obvious why, but after speaking to a few of my customers, who over the years I became friends with, I realized why there was this perceived notion that motion graphics, like graphic design, are easy to do, that the computer does it all for you and that all it takes is just technical know-how. Either that or “Hey, you are an artist, buddy, come on, it’s like fun anyways, right?”.
But why are motion graphics so expensive? Well, you are in luck, ’cause today I’m going to talk just about that! Hit the break to read more.

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