LOOT IT
Brand animation · preloaders · Alexey Sukhariev · Design engineer
Loop animations for LOOT IT, a mystery-box brand. The gold diamond sitting in the middle of the wordmark is treated as a portal: the prize is thrown out of it, spins at the top of the arc and is swallowed again. Three of them play on the site while a game loads. The three run on one scene, so they read as one system rather than three animations.
A preloader that shows what you are playing for
LOOT IT sells the moment a box opens, and its logo already contained the idea: a gold diamond drawn in perspective, sitting between LOOT and IT like a plate you could stand something on. So instead of animating the wordmark I treated that diamond as a portal. The prize is fired out of it, turns at the top of its arc and drops back through, and the mark returns to rest. The clips run on the site while a game loads — the wait is spent looking at the merchandise instead of a spinner.
One loop, 49 frames, no crossfade
A loop is 49 frames at 30 fps — 1.63 seconds. The prize is only in the air for 22 of them; the rest is an empty portal, and that is what lets the clip run forever: the first and the last frame are the same quiet state, so nothing has to be dissolved to hide a seam. The timing lives entirely in the spacing. The prize leaves the portal at 36 pixels a frame and moves 2 pixels between the two frames at the top of the arc, which is what makes it read as thrown rather than lifted.
The blur is rendered, not added
Everything is Cycles at 1000 samples with motion blur on and the shutter fully open, so the smear is a property of the render rather than a filter applied afterwards: it shows up exactly where the prize is moving fastest and is gone at the top. The camera is orthographic, which is the decision that keeps the piece a logo — the lockup stays flat and graphic, and the prize is the only thing in the frame with volume. The letters are geometry lit by the same seven lights, so they pick up the portal, and the flash under the prize is an animated area light, not a glow drawn on top.
One scene, three payloads
The set covers three tiers of prize — sneakers, a watch, a car — and all three are the same scene with the object swapped. Same portal, same lights, same 49-frame move, which is also why they can be cut together: three loops in a row read as one system rather than three animations. The prize models are stock geometry, rebuilt for this scene — materials, finish and light are what make a bought model sit in a shot instead of floating in it.
The revisions were about the prize, not the motion
It took eight passes to land three clips, and not one of the notes was about the movement. We were choosing the object: the watch went from a steel sports model through two Apple Watches to a Daytona, and then from a black dial to the white one; the car needed both a model and a colour. The arc never moved — in the first version and in the last the prize is in the air for frames 13 to 34 of 49. The animation was a couple of hours of work; the calendar went into picking what comes out of the portal.
Delivered with alpha, cropped to the content
The scene renders with a transparent film, so alpha comes straight out of Cycles and there is no matte to key. Each variant ships three ways: a MOV carrying the alpha channel and a GIF, both cropped to the artwork at 1240×480, plus the full 1920×1080 PNG sequence for anything that needs to be recomposed later. Forty-nine frames each. That crop matters more than it sounds — a preloader is dropped into a page by a developer, and one that arrives as a rectangle of black has to be keyed or masked before it can sit on the brand’s own surface.
What is mine here
The LOOT IT wordmark and the diamond are the client’s brand — I animated them, I did not draw them. The prizes are licensed third-party products and the models are stock, customised for this scene. What is mine is the motion and its timing, the lighting and the render setup, and the delivery: the loop that closes on itself and the formats it ships in.
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