In Frame
Event opener · 3D identity · Alexey Sukhariev · Design engineer
A sixteen-second opener for a live awards ceremony, made entirely in 3D. The brand mark is cast in thick glass and shot in macro for eleven seconds before the camera pulls back far enough for it to be read as a logo. It played on the main screen behind the stage, and a ten-minute version of the same object ran as the room’s standing loop.
One logo, a very large screen, and nothing else to hide behind
The brief was an opener for a live awards ceremony: the film that runs on the main screen before anyone speaks. There was no product to show, no footage to cut and no cast — the identity was already designed and approved, and the only thing available to animate was a single mark: two mirrored brackets with an empty counter between them, a frame drawn as a glyph. Everything an audience of that size would look at for sixteen seconds had to come from material, light and movement. That is the whole job, and it is a harder job than it sounds: with one object in frame there is nowhere for a weak surface to hide.
The work was the glass, not the animation
Most of the calendar went into the surface. The mark had to look expensive in close-up, which in practice means refraction that behaves: a bevel wide enough to catch a highlight, dispersion that splits colour on the edges without turning the object into a prism, and a body thick enough that light travelling through it picks up the gradient behind. Six passes were rendered on the same geometry, changing thickness, dispersion and the angle the light enters the bevel. The version that shipped is the one where the glass reads as a solid object rather than as a shader: you can see where it is thick, and the colour inside it comes from the background rather than from a tint.
Sixteen seconds that begin inside the logo
The film opens in macro, travelling along the edges of the glass, and stays there for eleven of its sixteen seconds. For that whole first stretch the audience cannot tell what they are looking at — it reads as an abstract, and the surface has to hold attention on its own. Only then does the camera pull back far enough for the shape to resolve, the mark lands, and the wordmark arrives. Putting the reveal at second eleven is the one structural decision in the piece: a logo shown at second one is a title card, and a title card is something a room stops watching.
It does not end on the logo — it goes through it
The last second is a transition rather than an ending. The wordmark retracts back into the mark, letter by letter, right to left; the camera pushes in; and the empty counter of the glyph — the hole that makes it read as a frame in the first place — opens up and becomes the doorway the next scene arrives through. It costs nothing extra to build, because that shape was already the strongest thing about the mark, and it means the opener hands over to the programme instead of stopping and cutting to black.
The same object, working as a backdrop
Between awards the screen behind the podium carried the same scene, cropped into macro and pushed cool — glass, no mark, nothing legible. That was deliberate: a backdrop that contains a logo competes with whoever is standing in front of it, and a backdrop that contains text competes with what is being said. Reusing the opener’s own geometry meant the room never left the identity even when the identity was not on screen.
And ten minutes of it, for the room
The second delivery was a standing loop: the same object on black, rendered out to eighteen thousand frames — ten minutes end to end. Measured against the opener it moves about ten times slower, which is the entire point. A loop that plays while people find their seats is lighting, not a film; it has to be interesting enough to look at and calm enough to ignore, and the only thing that really happens over those ten minutes is a highlight crossing the bevel.
What is mine here
The identity — the mark, the wordmark and the palette — came from the client, already designed and approved. Mine is everything three-dimensional: building the mark as geometry, the material and lighting work, the camera and the animation, and the renders. The final programme master was assembled by the event’s editor, so what is shown here is my delivery as it appears in the event’s own film. Thirteen versions of the scene stand behind sixteen finished seconds, and almost all of that iteration was spent on one question — what the glass does with the light.
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