Today I had an opportunity to spend some time with Apple Motion. It’s been a while since I’ve really had an opportunity to make something with it ¹, but a logo I’ve made recently had me wanting to pulling it out. It has an organic flow, and I thought it would be a perfect opportunity to play with Motion’s excellent masking features.

The animation embedded below uses two cameras, one which tracks roughly with the expanding root structure of the tree ² and one which sees the entire 1080p canvas. It’s cool to see the cut between the two, though I might ripple the transition back a few frames so the roots are still growing when camera 2 takes over.

One weird thing about Motion, however, is the complete lack of built in wipe effects. I hacked a wipe transition in the embedded animation by drawing a black rectangle over “ooted,” and then feathering the edge to create a fall off to transparency. I then animated the square to move off the canvas, revealing “ooted” as it did so. My hack works because I was working against a single color background, which won’t work a lot in my projects, but finding simple hacks is half the fun of creating!

Anyway, here’s my final product ³, I really need to make use of Motion more often.