Beyond an Animated Logo: The Animation Toolkit

Adam Flaherty

Executive Producer

Any company that takes pride in their brand is excited to see their logo animated in a unique way.  There are many inexpensive templates that can draw your logo with lasers or create a stunning light show where your logo assimilates from a zillion particles, but most companies seek something that’s more unique to their brand.

A good logo animation has thought and purpose behind it. At the risk of sounding pompous, the animation should draw inspiration from the nuances of the design, and it should reflect the company culture. It can include accompanying sound design if appropriate, and it can be on a stylized background, or on an alpha channel that allows a company with a bit of editing know-how to drop it on top of footage and maintain transparency.

But beyond logos, there are a lot of different types of custom animated assets that are useful to businesses. Below, we highlight some specific animation assets that we think are crucial to producing professional quality video assets for your website, social media channels, or marketing campaigns. And while each individual animation has its role, the real efficiency comes in a library of branded animation assets. With everything you need pre-built and ready to be layered onto new footage, creating new video assets becomes as easy as point, shoot, and edit. 

Here’s an overview of a few animated assets and our Tool Kit approach to creating branded videos that stand out online.


A Library of Animated Assets

When we build a library of animated assets for clients (which we call an Animation Tool Kit), it can be extremely useful in two ways:

Companies with internal video capabilities can take a library of animated assets and create their own original content.

Companies without internal capabilities can request content from our team, and using the library of animated assets we’ve developed, we can turn that content around quickly and affordably.

So what, exactly, is this “Animation Tool Kit”?  Well, it can include a number of different things, because we recommend different assets for different clients.

For example, if your brand features heavy iconography, we would recommend giving those icons some simple, tasteful motion.

If your brand creates lots of “thought leader” content for YouTube or LinkedIn, you might benefit from a clean, modern lower third graphic animation (like we use at the beginning of this director feature) or bumpers for the beginning and end of your videos (as we use here) so that all of your content is cohesive.

Or, if you’re planning a lot of ongoing content such as promoting new products, announcing discounts or promotions, or introducing new hires with content that is customized to the individuals, we’d work with you to develop a toolkit with many interchangeable assets (as we did for BankNewport below) that can be arranged in any number of ways to develop fresh, original content that is both unique and on brand.

Simple animated assets can be a powerful way to grab a viewer’s attention and elevate your branding, and at Saltwater’s Motion and Sound department, we love us some animation.

This approach is especially useful for companies that capture a lot of video footage and need an efficient way to turn that footage into assets. 

The Boston Celtics are a great example of this. They have hours of footage from every game, from player highlights to pre-game interviews to post-game press conferences. Turning that recorded footage into assets to be played in the arena, or shared on social media, or incorporated into advertising campaigns, requires turning it into a polished asset instead of just a clip of footage.


We built an Animation Tool Kit for the Celtics that enables them to efficiently layer in logo animations, player animations, transitions, and title cards so that a branded video of a highlight play can be up on social media before the next commercial break. 

With all the tools at your fingertips, what could you do with the video footage taking up space on your hard drive? Drop us a line with questions, ideas, or to start discussing your own Animation Tool Kit.



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