It all adds up

No single effect is particularly complex on its own. The atmosphere comes from layering lots of small details together. From subtle particle movement and colour grading to animated masks, glows and lighting passes, each element contributes a little something to the final result. Remove one layer and you might not notice it immediately. Remove ten, and the sequence starts to lose its depth and impact.

Whilst some may only see a particular moment for a split second, every additional layer contributes to the final result. And when you're dealing with a fanbase that loves to dissect every trailer frame by frame, those subtle details become just as important as the obvious ones.

The Underwater Membranes

For the underwater membrane sequences, I wanted them to feel alien, unrecognisable, and just a little ethereal.

Most of that came from layering together turbulent displacements, fractal noise and gradients. The icing on the cake ended up being a touch of chromatic aberration (Best observed in the final animation shown at the end of this case study), which gave the larger globules this almost gelatinous quality that I wasn't expecting but absolutely loved.

Faking a Planet

Despite appearances, the rolling planet isn't actually 3D.

It's simply a flattened map of Mars masked inside a circle, pre-composed, and given a bulge effect to fake the curvature. From there it was just a case of keyframing the terrain so it rolled convincingly as the whole pre-comp moved through the shot.

It's one of those little cheats that looks far more complicated than it really is.

Happy Accidents

The black particulate effect was originally supposed to be stars, still but twinkling. But when applying that, the whole animation started to feel very two dimensional, in the literal sense. I kept thinking back to the original title sequence from Metroid Prime on Gamecube. How every menu input caused a major shift in the location of this alien biological environment.

I spent far longer than I'd like to admit trying to generate convincing star fields inside After Effects, layering different systems together, tweaking settings, then inevitably breaking them again.

What I accidentally ended up with was something much better.

Instead of stars, it became this cloud of dark and dusty contaminants that drifted through the scene. It made the environment feel unsafe, as though Samus had wandered somewhere not meant for her, and, in the story building in my own head, was actively accelerating the growth of her Metroid DNA.

Organic Horror

The veiny membrane was one of the last additions to the project. Up until that point, the red and purple freeform gradient looked... fine. But also a little too clean.

I kept thinking back to Scorn and the way it wraps your character in thin sheets of organic material. That inspired me to imagine these sequences less as an external environment, and more as peering into some strange microscopic biome inside Samus herself.

I still wanted to keep things relatively restrained. As much as I prefer Metroid when it leans into horror, I never wanted this to cross the line into outright gore.

The Suit's Interface

One of the shots I spent the most time iterating on was the close-up of Samus's eye. From the outset, I knew I wanted her visor's interface to react to her eye movements, with the targeting reticule shifting subtly as she looked around.

Originally, every interface
element was designed in black.

The more I developed the sequence, though, the more I realised those darker overlays were working against me. They obscured the eye too much, which was supposed to be the focal point of the shot.

I went back to the official Metroid Prime games and studied how the visor interfaces are presented. Many of the interface elements use a slightly translucent geometric forms with subtle glow effects and gently blurred edges, allowing them to feel like part of the visor rather than something simply placed on top of it. These served as great goalposts for the final designs.

The targeting reticule was adjusted in the main composition using a layer style to apply the glow, and a blending mode to mask out the black, and I introduced a couple of small diagnostic pop-ups showing unstable genetic readings.

More importantly, the colour shift became part of the storytelling. The darker tones throughout the sequence are reserved for the alien environment and the threat growing inside Samus. The visor, on the other hand, represents the part of her that's still fighting back. Giving those interface elements a luminous glow not only improved readability, but also created a subtle visual distinction between the corruption and the technology trying to contain it.

Bringing the Eye to Life

The close-up eye shots began with a fantastic photograph by Amanda Halbjørn on Unsplash.

To make it usable, I had to separate the individual components so they could move independently. In other words...

I had to channel a little serial killer energy and carefully cut the eye apart in Photoshop.

This was where reusing assets from the storyboard really paid off. I'd already proven I could build a convincing eye for the planning stage, so bringing it into After Effects and refining it further felt like a natural progression rather than starting again.

Once the pieces were in place, the focus shifted to the tiny details.

How much does an eyeball actually move? Does it jitter? How quickly do pupils react? They're the sort of details most people never consciously notice, but they absolutely notice when they're wrong.

Revealing the Logo

Whilst I can't take any credit for the METROID portion of the logo, I'll happily take credit for RAVENOUS because I'm genuinely chuffed with how it turned out.

The corrupting tendrils that is slowly introduced throughout the length of the animation became a final hurrah at the end, it made sense for this to be the way the logo unveils itself.

The tendrils are in the background treatment, they’re in the eye Samus as the DNA begins to overwhelm her, it’s behind and on the planet as it settles into view. The tricky party was how to reveal a solid geometric logo in stages using natural forms.

The solution? Displacement warps and a lot of masking, all layered over one another.

As for how RAVENOUS reveals itself, I wanted to avoid over complicating it. Having it stabilise and focus into view like it’s emerging from water felt very on theme with the rest of the animation.