Saru Saru

Six seconds.
Only one and a half of them move.

A logo animation built to end rather than to loop: a shockwave, a single frame of colour, and a long hold on the mark.

Year: 2025
Client: Saru Saru
Role: Motion design, art direction
Deliverable: One 6.4 s sting, 64 frames at 10 fps

Brief

A wordmark that had to move

Saru Saru already had a mark. It needed one that could open a video.

The ask was a single asset with several jobs: a signature at the end of a film, a stinger on social, a title card over content. Short enough to sit in front of something else without becoming the something else.

The finished sting. 6.4 seconds, looping here so you can watch it twice.

Reference

The reference is the curve, not the picture

The starting point was the Akira explosion.

Nothing here is drawn like Akira. I took the shape of the energy: a white dome that expands faster than the eye can follow, then keeps expanding after you expect it to stop.

I set the easing from that shape. The first second runs on a curve that starts near-instant and slows for a long time, so the opening reads as a blast.

I explored three directions. In this one the mark arrives after the blast rather than inside it.

Timing

One and a half seconds of event

Read frame by frame, most of the animation sits still.

1.5 s

event

4.9 s

hold on the mark

Sixteen frames carry the movement. The remaining forty-eight hold the wordmark dead centre while grain and dust drift across it.

The ratio is the decision. A sting that keeps moving competes with whatever it introduces; one that resolves early hands the frame over. The hold is the deliverable.

A white field of concentric rings filling the frame. — The last two frames are four seconds apart, and nothing separates them.

An almost entirely black frame with a single white dot at the centre. — The last two frames are four seconds apart, and nothing separates them.

Detail

The frame you are not meant to see

At 1.3 seconds, for one frame, the animation goes to colour.

Magenta, cyan and green shards fire out from behind the dome and are gone before the next frame. At speed you do not see colour. You see an impact.

It is the only colour in six seconds, and it is borrowed from print: the three process inks, out of register, the way a misprinted page looks. I took the texture of the whole piece from that frame: the grain, the dust and the halation around the white read from the same idea.

The single colour frame, held still: magenta, cyan and green wedges radiating from the white dome. — Frame 13 of 64, stopped. At full speed it lasts 100 milliseconds.

Use

Built to end, not to loop

The hold makes the asset usable.

The animation resolves to a frame it can sit on, so the same file works as an opener, as an end card and as a still. Cut it anywhere after two seconds and you have a poster. Freeze it and you have the logo.

A sting that never settles
can only ever be a sting.

Two retro television sets stacked on a yellow background, one cyan and one magenta, each playing a different moment of the animation. — Two moments of the same six seconds, and the process inks that supplied the one colour frame.

Outcome

What the six seconds had to do

The brief was to animate a logo. The work was deciding when to stop.

The first quarter of the runtime holds the movement, the rest holds the name. You watch because of the blast. You remember because of the hold.

Sixteen frames of noise.
Forty-eight of silence.

Where it stops, and stays.

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