I mean. Ok. I'm not sure how applicable the video's breakdown is to anyone else. I built this TV ident with the contraption I call the VOP. It's a video based optical printer running on a Pi. It does light streaks, extrusions and optical composites by showing the new element on an HDMI screen and a camera captures it and adds the light to any previously exposed image for that frame number. It's an extremely slow and tedious workflow. But it's the closest I have managed to get to the old school way of doing optical printer composites like ILM used to do it. It's FOSS and on github if anyone is curious.

So the video here is a showcase of how I used the VOP to do the ident in 15 exposure passes. It's a literally destructive process with no undos. If you mess up, you have to live with it... or start again from scratch.

My own thoughts about the result here. I think I underestimated how dark the blue of the "TRAILER" text is. Works good in a dark viewing room. And I think I should have shortened the overall runtime to maybe 6-8 seconds instead of 10 to have less dead space.

Link to reel - https://www.instagram.com/reel/DedkM9hTE3k

Another page posting same format - https://www.instagram.com/reel/DeXCn5soOGM

Thanks in advance 🙌

Been experimenting more with Claude Opus 5.5 and the Opac X plugin inside After Effects, and this time I made a solar system explainer.

The coolest part is that everything is still fully editable inside After Effects. Every tiny layer, shape, animation, and little detail can be adjusted manually. It's not just a rendered video.

I can still tweak the keyframes, change the timing, modify individual elements, or customize pretty much anything.

It's been really fun seeing how AI can help build animations while still giving you full creative control.

Still experimenting with what's possible, but thought I'd share this one here.

What do you guys think? Would you find something like this useful in your AE workflow?