In the next few Motion 5 tutorials, we will make a Halloween themed logo intro clip for a seasonal product trailer. This intro will use the Parallax effect and be 10 seconds in duration, in order to be placed in a drop zone of the same duration in a product trailer template.

Much like the Ken Burns effect, the Parallax effect is used to simulate movement of static graphics. The intro will consist of several layers of these graphics and by adding camera movement in to the mix, we will have a 2.5 D animation.

Our first step is to prepare these graphics. In this example we will use several royalty free photos from publicdomainpictures.net. The main photo is of a gravestone surrounded by high weeds. The second is a larger area of weeds, the third photo contains a raven and the fourth photo contains another gravestone.

Our background image will be the photo of only the high weeds. For the Parallax effect, we will have the other design elements, two gravestones and a raven, on layers above the background. By moving each layer slightly and also moving the camera, we get the illusion that we are watching a video instead of static images.

We will put the larger gravestone in the foreground as the main point of interest. So, we need to remove the gravestone from the original background by selecting and cut/pasting it on to its own transparent layer in the working document.

Next, we will isolate the raven from the background of the original photo and paste it into our working document on a layer above the gravestone layer. To keep the proportions constant, we will need to reduce the raven image slightly and, with a little more tweaking, place the bird so that it appears to be standing on the gravestone. Also, as this is a Halloween intro clip, we will change the raven eyes to a deep red, using a few layer styles.

We will repeat this process to remove the smaller gravestone from its original background and place it in the working document. To blend the second gravestone into the background, we can use the Eraser tool with a soft edge to remove some of the bottom edge of the gravestone, giving the appearance that the weeds have grown up around the foot of the gravestone.

At this point we have all our design elements in place but they still need a little more blending. We can soften the sharp edges of the gravestones and the raven by adding an inner shadow to each.

This will be a night scene and the original photos were taken in daylight. As you can see from the examples, we changed day to night. To do this we used the Photo Filter in Photoshop to add some darkness to each layer. The color that I like to use for this technique is RGB (10, 110 ,150) at about 80% Density.

Now, we will save the document as a layered Photoshop image that we can import into Motion 5.

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