The problem
The Hello.World Consulting logo needed to glow like a neon sign on a frosted glass card. Twelve seconds, for a promo.
I can’t draw to save my life. I’ve tried, I’ve practiced, and I’m still kind of shit. That left two options: get better at art or make the logo move in code. I don’t plan on taking up any new hobbies, so Manim it was.
Image-to-video AI was out too. AI video still falls apart the second you need precise motion, and precise motion was the whole job. I wanted every frame to come from something I wrote and own.
Manim over matter
This was my first time giving Manim a proper go. I had played around with it before but never actually tried to finish something.
First I cleaned up the SVG in Inkscape, simplified it, and made it grayscale.
Then I brought it into the IDE and started animating.
That’s where I got stuck.
The biggest problem was making the outline smooth. First I thought the SVG was bad. Then, when that didn’t fix it, I moved on to debugging the code.
I lost an embarrassing amount of time to that one problem.
It starts working after I throw it away
After hours of banging my head against a brick wall, I reset. I went back to the SVG and rebuilt it from scratch.
That was what I needed. I still do not know what caused the original spikes, but starting over removed them. Hours of debugging vanished because I rebuilt the file in ten minutes. Annoying, but effective.
Now that I had a functioning animation of the logo, it was time to make it look good: the neon glow and the frosted glass card.
Making the glow effect and frosted card effect was much more intuitive, especially compared to fixing the animation. I knocked out both in under an hour. Getting the glow to interact with the card took a bit, but it sells the effect much better.
The fun part
Once the animation was good enough, I moved to editing and Foley. I know audio well and video barely at all, so I handled the edit first. I tried CapCut because the browser version was free.
This was surprisingly good. CapCut felt natural and not too obtuse or in the way. It lacks a few tools I wanted, but nothing that enough skill could not route around.
With the video blocked out, it was time for audio, my favorite part. I’ve been into music production since I was young, so I was already comfortable in Ableton Live. For the sound effects, I went for a stylized vintage CRT TV turning on and then off.
After the visual edit in CapCut and the sound work in Ableton, I stitched the final version together.
What I learned
- Manim is powerful but not as straightforward as I expected, and SVGs are annoying.
- The rise of CapCut makes sense after trying it. I honestly think a lot of other software could learn from the simple design language and UX.
- Using Python for motion and timing instead of logic changed how I think about it. It felt less like wiring logic and more like arranging frames.
Finished video
You can watch the version with audio here: Watch the Manim animation on Facebook
See It In Action
Manim is still annoying. It is also the first animation tool I have used where code felt like a useful constraint instead of a workaround. The glow is a few lines of Python I own, and they will render the same twelve seconds every time I run them.