Convos 2008 Season Opener

Each year Purdue Convocations asks us to make their season preview DVD. It's one of the more fun projects we get to do each year. We undertake most aspects of the DVD's production, from creating all the motion graphics to editing every segment together to creating the entire DVD menu functionality and animation.

We started the process by meeting with the client. They asked for a clean line opener and that's about all the direction they gave us. With that to go on we came up with a concept. We wanted the whole thing to look like vector graphics, but have motion through 3D space. To do this we asked Brad Sommer to create the motion lines in Maya. Brad and I decided to have the lines create the Convocations logo and have a camera flying around through the lines.

When Brad was done animating the lines along paths in Maya, he handed the rendered file off to me to work on in After Effects. I took his animation and added camera shake and a camera bounce to the audio. I then took a depth render pass that Brad created and applied it for some depth of field. Brad's animation ended with the spinning blue line so I also added the full Convos logo and camera pull to reveal it.

We shot the Convocations director on a green screen and both Brad and I keyed him out in After Effects. Brad then took my pass of the opener and combined that with the keyed video footage. I then took that After Effect project and added an animated lower 3rd ID and transition to the opening segment.