Audiograms

Designed a cohesive look and feel for CBC Podcasts’ audiograms.

The industry default is generally a waveform animation, but I wanted to design something different that made it immediately clear exactly what show and episode the clip was from so that interested listeners could easily find the podcast on their app of choice later.

I landed on this style that mimics the user interface of a podcast app. It offers a lot of flexibility to add extras like waveforms or particle animations.

The animations for this template are driven mostly by markers and expressions, including the episode name scrolling. I wanted the episode title to stay static at first to give people the chance to start reading it, so instead of After Effects’ Autoscroll preset (which didn’t offer the level of control I was looking for), I wrote an expression that relied on a marker and a slider control:

timer = (time-thisLayer.marker.key(1).time);

if (timer > 0){

value - timer*thisComp.layer("controls").effect("title scroll speed")("Slider")

} else {

value

}

The source text also has adjustable padding using another slider control.