Purdue Women's Basketball Opener

This year we wanted to make a music video style opener for the women's basketball team. We ended up shooting all the players on blue screen and keying them out in After Effects. We shot them in 1080p with a Sony XD Cam so they'd be easier to key out. I then created a light wall to place behind them in photoshop and AE. Brad Sommer and I composited them all and handed the completed footage off to Stephanie Mae who edited it all together.

My favorite thing I made was the "Fast P" logo at the end of the piece. Too bad we had to have this completed about a month before Andrew Kramer's optical flares plugin was released.

Purdue Men's Basketball Opener

Every year we get to make a new opener for both the Purdue men's and women's basketball teams and I just realized I never posted anything about them this year. First off is the opener for the men, which you'll find below.

The still images are taken from photographs and we cut them apart and rebuilt them with z-depth so we could pan a camera across them and have the elements move. We also used the After Effects puppet tool to add some slight movement to Purdue players.

The flash images we created with photographs we took of the players and cut them out in PhotoShop and replaced the backgrounds. We had the players perform basketball type actions and we shot them with a DSLR using a rapid shutter speed.

The graphics were done by myself and Brad Sommer. The individual player photos were taken by myself and Les Eller, and it was all cut together by Louis Dierckman.

Enjoy!

A Fight For Hope

Recently at Purdue I was tasked with creating a few graphics for a professor who is working on a cure for epilepsy. The goal was to present some information about how widespread the disease is and to set up the story of a few individuals who suffer from the disease.

The professor then did a PowerPoint presentation detailing his research followed by a question and answer period.

This first video below is the introduction I created. The voice-over was provided to me and I built everything in After Effects and Illustrator. I thought it would be fun to build some objects in 3D space within AE. I used some solids to construct the box along with a light and camera.

One thing that helps tremendously with camera movement in AE is to use the Separate XYZ preset. You make a null object and set it to 3D and then parent the camera to it. Then apply the Separate XYZ preset to the null object and you can then control the camera's X,Y, and Z axis independet of each other. It gives you much better control of the camera and lets you finely tune your movements with great ease.

Here is the first part of the opener:

The middle part was an edit highlighting the stories of the five people stricken with epilepsy and this second video below is the last part of the introduction. Again it was all done within AE:

A New Way To Do Things

In an effort to make my life simpler I decided to use my Vimeo account to post my videos. I will just embed them from there into my posts. This should also be better for you, the viewer, because it won't navigate you away from the post. I hope this is a suitable solution for everyone.

I also plan on updating all my previous posts to be this way, but it may take a little time.

Enjoy!