CVSTMCVLT, twenty-seven times
One blackletter wordmark, one source file, twenty-seven passes — and a moving version of the same stack. Nothing was redrawn between them.
One wordmark. One file. Twenty-seven passes and a moving version, all off the same black-and-white artwork, none of it redrawn in between.
The clip at the top is not a different piece — it is Z-Depth + Braille + Box Art + Domain Warp running rather than sitting still. The same stack, one frame of it, appears further down as a still.
What a logo does that a photograph doesn't
A photograph gives V3KTR something obvious to read: faces in front, a background behind, a real falloff between them. Flat vector artwork gives it none of that — there is no depth in a black-and-white wordmark, because there was never a scene.
V3KTR infers one anyway. The depth pass runs on any image, and on flat art it reads the mark itself as the near surface and the ground as far. That is why the depth-driven effects on this page have anything to bite on at all, and it is the reason a logo run looks structural rather than merely filtered: Depth DOF defocuses around the letterforms, Point Cloud scatters the strokes forward, Z-Depth turns the mark itself into the picture.
It is an inference, not a measurement. On a photograph the depth map is close to true. Here it is a plausible invention — and that invention is what the effects are shaped by.
Still a logo
At the near end the mark survives intact and the treatment sits on it.
Rebuilt out of parts
Further along, the letterforms stop being drawn and start being assembled — from dots, blocks, cells, characters. The shape holds because the rebuild follows it, not because any of the original strokes are still there.
Depth on a flat file
These are the ones that make the inference visible. Nothing in the source was ever in front of anything else.
cv27 is the still of the clip at the top of this page — same four effects, one frame.
Colour, from a file that had none
The source is a light mark on a dark ground and carries no colour at all — the passes that add none come back fully desaturated, R, G and B equal on every pixel. So every colour on this page was generated: mapped in by Gradient Map, Split Tone, Solarize and Relight rather than lifted from anything that was in the file.
Past reading
And at the far end it stops being type.
Notes for anyone doing this to their own mark
Give it the biggest file you have. Everything here ran at 3840×2160 and the images on this page are served at 2560px rather than the usual 1400 — halftone, braille and dither all resolve into mush at small sizes, and they are most of what makes these interesting.
A monochrome source is not a limitation. Several of these read as full-colour pieces and none of that colour existed in the file.
The stack order matters more than the stack. Domain Warp appears in seven of these
twenty-seven and does something different in every one, depending on what ran before it.
It runs in a browser, on your machine, for free — processor.v3ktr.com. Drop a logo in and roll it.