I was working with a group of close friends to develop a comedy YouTube channel, based around video gaming and popular culture. So we needed to find a quirky name and brand that fits our weird and dry senses of humor.

Hanging out as a group, we had a game; stupid band names. Hunting down the best band names in our normal speech (or, abnormal speech). Such as in the middle of a game of Dungeons and Dragons, when a character made an alcoholic concoction of fermented fish, we joked that that would be a perfect folk band name: “Dr. Bartholomew’s Experimental Fish Whisky.”

While searching for a brand name for this odd new endeavor, we remembered some of our old band names, and Fish Whisky was born.

I then went to work on creating a logo. I wanted to play with that mix of dry and silly, so I went with a classic badge-style logo, but with an illustrated Cthulhu-esque monster climbing out of a de-facto whisky barrel.

Then, it was time to animate it. Using After Effects I took all the 2D elements from Adobe Illustrator and projected some of them onto a 3D plane, and piece by piece animated them all.

Most of it is standard After Effects keyframe animation, but some of the elements needed a little something extra. I utilized the Newton physics engine to give some of the elements the feeling of weight and realism. I also add rigged the tentacle using bones and Inverse Kinematic bones.

Finally I downloaded a series of sound effects from Splice, and laid them out and mixed them to create a track that would fit along with the animation, fleshing it out and creating both a sense of realism, and an extra comedic addition.

What I ended up with was a quirky, silly, fun, but dry intro for an equally silly YouTube channel.

Check out the video here!