How I created an intro for my video course
Introduction
I have been wanting to create a video course for a while. I wanted to try, not only to be part of a plattform, but to host it in a custom website. This way, it has its own character — and brand — under a personal website.
Brand
I decided to create a small sequence with a custom intro. Nothing too fancy. I was going for a retro, warm feeling.
The logo uses a pixelated font, to evoke that retro computing vibe.
Choosing a color palette
Having a palette gives some consistency to the design. It does not mean no other considerations are necessary for a good design, but it is a good start.
In this case I had an extended palette for the website and part of it only for the video content.
I used cooolors.co to explore different palettes.
- The left palette is for the website.
- The right one is reserved for the video contents.
- They can be used separately or together.
Using blender
I wanted a retro, warm feeling with flat colours, not very 3d. Nonetheless, because I wanted accurate camera movements zooming into a CRT screen, I decided to use Blender.
Blender is a surprisingly versatile program, not only for 2d, but for 2d animation and video compositing.
A screen of the modelled objects in a wireframe view.
Other technologies
ffmpeg
The swiss knife of video processing. Very useful, for example, to create twitter versions of your video.
# video to twitter
ffmpeg -i "original.mp4"
-filter:v "scale='min(1280,iw)':min'(720,ih)':
force_original_aspect_ratio=decrease,pad=
1280:720:(ow-iw)/2:(oh-ih)/2"
-pix_fmt yuv420p "twitter.mp4"
An ffmpeg command I use to generate videos for Twitter. Twitter is quite picky with the videos it accepts — As an example, twitter has a maximum length of 2 minutes and 20 seconds.
moviepy
Moviepy is a python wrapper for ffmpeg in Python, and it can be extremely useful to automate simple video editing — Hopefully the automation can pay off in saved time in the future.
Timeline
- One day of thinking about the concept and colors.
- Another day of modeling and rendering tog et the final video.
I knew Blender beforehand, but it can be quite fast once you get used to it.
In action
You can check the intro in the first seconds of the first episode of the fullstack course
I hope you can steal some ideas for your video workflow.
Feedback and comments are welcome!
