UPDATE: Kindle 2 Contest

The winners have been announced and I'm one of them! Thanks to everyone that put a vote in for me. I appreciate it. I'll post pictures of the Kindle with my artwork on it when I get it.

Kindle 2 Contest

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Engadget.com has a contest where they asked artists to design something that could be engraved on the back of an Amazon Kindle 2. If you win the contest you win the Kindle with the engraved back. The rules stated that it had to be black and white and in an .eps format. Other than that it was wide open.

I thought this looked like a fun contest and decided to try my hand at designing something. I don't get to work in Illustrator as much as I would like and felt this would be a good opportunity to work on my skill set with that software.

When coming up with ideas I settled on a steampunk design. I've always thought it would be a lot of fun to design things with that style and felt this would be a great time to do that. I spent my free time over a couple of days working up what you see in the link above.

I haven't heard back from Engadget about my design or if it's been selected as one of the finalist, but when I do I'll be sure to let you know.

Hope you like it.

Convocations 2009 DVD Opener

For the Convocations 2009 season preview DVD we were asked to do something with kinetic text. Although I've seen a lot of uses of kinetic text in various commercials or on YouTube, I've never had an opportunity to make something using this technique. When Convocations came to us wanting to do this I was pretty excited to try it out.

Based on what Convocations wanted we decided to keep the movement simple and just focus on the message rather than a lot of flashy movements. Because of this I restricted most movement to the X and Y axis and kept the color pallet in line with their seasonal brochure, which happened to be rather muted with hints of color.

Convocations provided me with audio and music bed that I used to base all the text and movement off of. They also provided an outline of specific elements they wanted to see (the falling/raising stock line for example). I took the audio file and placed it in Adobe Premiere and used a new feature in CS4 that transcribes all the audio into meta data and places it at the appropriate time code. I then made whatever tweaks it needed and saved it out to bring into After Effects. Using another new feature in AE CS4 I imported the audio file and AE placed layer markers for every word of dialogue onto the audio layer based off of the meta data from Premiere. This allowed me to have precise timing for the words appearing and also allowed me to see visually what word was being spoken at what time on the waveform. I then proceeded to animate the camera/text to the timing of the voiceover. Check out the opener below.



I was also asked to make three short segments highlighting the pick 5 option for that season. Convocations had a few ideas for them and below are the ones that I created.










Overall this was a lot of fun to do and was a fun learning experience. Enjoy.

Pacers In-Game Segments

At the beginning of the Pacers basketball season I was lucky enough to get to make a few opening graphics for small in-game video segments. The first one I made was a graphic for a segment called Bang the Drums Cam. Basically at the end of the this animated graphic there would be an image of some drums on the lower 3rd of the screen with an alpha channel for audience members to act like they were banging on the drums. I was asked to make it in a sort of Rock Band graphic style and the video below is what I cam up with. It was a lot of fun to make. I created some of the elements in Illustrator and brought them all into After Effects to add the animation.



The second one was an opener for an edited piece showcasing NBA bloopers. I came up with the self-destructing text idea and I had a lot of fun coming up with ways to make the text fall apart. I created the background in Photoshop and animated it all in After Effects.



The third one was a celebrity look-a-like spirit bumper. The producer would pre-select a celebrity and when the segment began they would look for a look-a-like in the crowd. Enjoy!

Addy Awards 2008

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The local Addy awards are being held at our facilities on Purdue's campus again so I was asked to make the screen dress artwork for the second year in a row. This year, unlike last year, the local Addy association had no theme for the event. Because of this I was pretty much given free reign to do what I wanted in the time allotted, which was about 1 day of work.

I saw some of the work done by James White on his site Signalnoise and have been fascinated with it. I decided to take this opportunity to make something inspired by his work. To make the screen dress I took the Addy A logo and recreated and stylized it inside of Photoshop. I drew the shapes and layered them until I was happy. I just wanted something really clean and minimal.

The second image was created using elements from the screen dress. It's a background for all the submissions for this years competition.

It was a lot of fun to just play around with the layout and shapes and work on something purely design driven. I hope Mr. White would approve.

Frank and Felix

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The third illustration for Finn's room!

Percy the Penguin

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Here is the second illustration done for my son's room. Done the same way as the owl illustration. I promise the next one won't be a bird. Enjoy!

Oliver the Owl

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A year ago, when we found out my wife was pregnant, she asked me to make some animal drawings for our baby's room. Now that our baby is 2 months old I feel I'm a little late making them (and she would readily agree), but better now than never.

The first one I made was an Owl. There really isn't any reason as to what animals I'm making other than they're ones that I think would be fun to create. There's also no particular reason that I named the owl other than I feel all animals in a kid's life have names and those names must begin with the same letter as the animal.

I began with a simple pencil sketch that took me all of 2 minutes to make. I then took that sketch and scanned it into the computer and proceeded to make a simple vector version of it in Illustrator. I wanted to have the smooth lines and simple shapes that offers. I then brought those shapes into Photoshop where I then made the final version that you see in the link above. I just used simple gradient colors and some watercolor brushes to create the texture.

It was a lot of fun to make and I promised to make 6 of them so you'll get to see at least 5 more of these little illustrations in the future. So keep checking back to see what animal will be next!