College of Science - Planned Giving

I was tasked to make an informative video for the College of Science at Purdue that was to be used to unveil their planned giving campaign. When talking to the client, I was asked to "make something with stick people, maybe." The idea was to show that through the support of numerous donors, the College of Science could support the brightest minds of both the student body and researchers. I decided to run with the stick people idea and came up with the simplified triangle body with a head.

I was extremely busy at the time and I found myself juggling many projects at once. I had previously picked out the music I wanted to use and some coworkers of mine had already shot the interviews on green screen. I took all those elements and created the entire project in the twilight hours of one evening. I'm happy with the result, especially for being under such a time crunch.

I colored a Scud Page!

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My cousin is getting married. In San Diego. The weekend before Comic-Con. I immediately began planning a way to convince my wife to spend the money to stay at least a couple of extra days past our original planned trip. I wanted to geek out a bit at a massive comic convention. Turns out my wife is awesome and we're staying. The next hurdle was to procure a pass, but all the passes were sold out. Thus enters Rob Schrab bearing his full-on manliness.

A few years ago Mr. Schrab turned out to be awesome as well. He granted me the privilege of working on his Scud omnibus. He then proved himself even more of a stud by actually printing my name in the credits of the book, something I totally was not expecting. Little did he know that he just bestowed upon me the status of professional in the comic industry. Thanks to him, I was able to apply for pro status with the Con and they gave me some credentials. I like to think Stan Lee himself vets every applicant and he deemed me worthy. So now I'm going. I'm a professional. And I'm excited.

I wanted to thank Rob Schrab for opening the door to Comic-Con and to remind people that he rocks.

Welcome to the Gun Zoo

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A couple of months ago my friend from high school contacted me and asked me to color a comic that he was working on and pitching to various comic publishers. Being a person who loves to try new mediums of art I answered with an immediate 'yes' and asked him to send me some pages. Once I received them I began the coloring process.

I've never really colored a comic other than one panel that I did for fun a couple of years ago. This means I didn't really have a process or approach to working on an entire page. I'm happy to say after doing a few pages, that I thoroughly enjoy doing this. I often wish I had more time to work on them.

Since I don't really know how it's done in the actual comic book industry, I just kind of made up my process along the way. I began by taking the scanned images and removing the white so that I only had a line drawing. We scanned them in as bitmaps so there would be no anti-aliasing of the blacks which allowed the easy removal of the white. I then began filling in all the flat colors with a lasso tool and paint bucket in photoshop, again keeping aliasing off. I generally kept each panel on it's own layer. I then created a layer for the shading that was separate from the flats layer. Using photoshop's pixel lock option I could easily do line holds on the line art for certain elements like glass or smoke. I did all of this with a wacom tablet.

Below is the final cover. The thumbnail above is a link to more images in various stages. Like always I'm having tremendous fun with this and am already developing an argument to purchase a wacom cintiq for personal use.

Chris Paschal - Writer

Morgan Burke - Pencils and Inks

Josh McDowell (me) - Color

Brian de la Cruz - Logo Design

2010 Purdue Christmas Show

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This year I was asked to make animated set extentions for the 2010 Purdue Christmas show. The image ended up being projected onto a 50 ft by 30 ft screen and it was pretty exciting to see all my hard work filling up our stage.

Steve Hall was the producer and he came up with the scenes and set design for the show. After talking with him and seeing some of the art style that was used for the stage elements I went to work on my Wacom to draw the sets. I had a lot of fun working with the new brush dynamics in Photoshop CS5 for this project.

After completing the paintings I brought them into After Effects and animated them. All the set extensions were animated and seamlessly looped. I also created transitional animations from day to night, evening to night, northern lights, snowfall, etc.

Overall this was a lot of work, but very fun and rewarding. Below you'll find some of the animated sets I made.

Better Know Your Boilers

We had an in-game segment for the Purdue women's basketball team where they were asked a series of questions and we'd edit together their answers.

I was asked to make a title slide and a set of question slides that could easily be updated for each game. Scott Horton was the art director on the project and I animated everything in After Effects.

Title Slide:

Example Question Slide:

Excellence in Awesomeness

My friend, JC Trombley, and I were talking one day about how we'd love to have something that would drive us to make all the crazy ideas we often would talk about, but not take the time to produce. Through these conversations we decide to create Excellence in Awesomenss, a place where we can post work that we make for ourselves in our own styles and explore art and design in the ways we find interesting. For me that means the ability to create things that aren't branded with Purdue University and can use colors other than gold and black. This is exciting for me. Gold and black lurk in my nightmares.

We have a lot of ambitions for this page and are working on a plan to roll out everything at some point, but first we'll start with a blog format where we can post our process and final work and gather feedback from whomever feels the need to espouse knowledge upon us.

We are working on getting the site up and running as I write this and wanted to give you a heads up.

Here is the link: excellenceinawesomeness.com

Here is a wallpaper: PURE AWESOMENESS!

Christmas 2010

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So I know it's been a bit since I posted last. It's not because I haven't been up to anything. On the contrary, I've been up to many things. First of which being adding a new member to my family. A daughter named Ada. She joined us on December 30th and life's been twice as hectic since.

One of the things I was able to get done right before she came around was to create this year's family Christmas card. This was sent before baby number two so that explains her absence on the card. For some reason my wife let me do whatever I wanted and was even on board with the angry picture thing. Maybe she thinks I'm a genius, but most likely she was nine months pregnant and had other things on her mind. We'll know for sure when next year rolls around and I pitch my next idea to her.

I created the card in Illustrator and added the photos in Photoshop. I drew slight inspiration from Olly Moss. Mainly just using a couple of colors and solid shapes.

Enjoy and Merry Christmas.

Twitter Page Background

i decided to finally sit down and customize my twitter page which is basically making a background and applying it.

i have never really tried to make a complex tiled background for a webpage and decided this would be a good opportunity to do it. i wanted to make an exclamation/talking/blurb type background to fit in with what twitter is all about so i settled on making a few word bubbles and arranging them into a texture.

i began by creating the word bubbles in illustrator and then bringing them into photoshop and using the offset filter to create the seamless wrap. honestly it turned out to be easier and more fun than i expected.

the tile is below and you can see it in use on my twitter page here. hopefully the colors don't make your eyes bleed. be warned.

New Demo Reel!

It's been a number of years since I last updated my demo reel so I took some time recently to finally make a new one.

I worked on everything in this reel in some way or created the project in its entirety. The people who worked on some of the pieces in the reel are Scott Horton, Brad Sommer, Adam Ruud, Louie Dierckman, and JC Trombley.

I'll post a shot breakdown with links to the full videos and credits sometime. Below is the reel.

Epic Mix Tape

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One of my coworkers recently moved to Texas. She asked all of us to make her a mix tape with some of our favorite songs for the drive. I took the opportunity to make it a graphics challenge with everyone involved. In order to win I decided to make the artwork on the disc as epic as possible, even if the songs didn't quite reflect what was depicted in the art. The result was an explosion coming out of a crater with lighting coming out of the ash all tied together with some heavy metal text in pastel colors. ROCK!

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!

"One" Campaign

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I recently was asked by my church to make some PowerPoint slides and some banners for a 4 week series. I was basically left wide open to do whatever I wanted. All that was provided to me were the phrases "one vision" "one commitment" "one hope" and "one confession"

I took those and decided to have the same look and feel throughout, but assigning a color for each week. I wanted the banners to work together slightly so I designed them all as one image and cut them out. That way the background elements would run throughout all 4 banners. The finished banners were 6 x 1.5 feet.

I tend to use a lot of stock images for textures and other elements and really wanted to make everything from scratch for these images. The texture in the background was from using a custom textured brush and varying the size and transparency along with some noise and photoshop clouds layers.

I always enjoy doing this stuff because I'm left wide open to do whatever and I really get to use the opportunity to play around with other styles. For these I would say my influences were Chuck Anderson and James White.

The images above are of the four title slides, one note slide and the banners.

Merry Christmas! ... really late

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So my wife asked me to make a Christmas card this last year. It's the first one I've ever made and quite honestly she kind of drug me kicking and screaming into it. I just ended up waiting until the very last minute and stayed up late making it, when all I really wanted to be doing was playing video games.

After I was done I really liked how it turned out and I'm pretty glad Katie prodded me into making it. I know this post is way after the holiday (don't worry the card itself was done in time to hit the family's mailboxes before the 25th), but I liked it and thought I'd share. Maybe this will kick me into posting some more stuff.

I hope everyone had a great holiday season.

UPDATE: Kindle 2 Design Contest

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So it's finally here! After months of waiting my Kindle 2 has arrived and I love it. It's made me a believer in the digital delivery of books. I want to thank engadget.com and adafruit industries for putting on the contest and all the people who voted for me to win one. I wish I could give you all free kindles as well, but I can't, so deal with it.

In the image link above I'm including my concept sketch that I drew up on the hotel provided notepad while I was in the middle of working a PowerPoint presentation. After that you can see the Illustration line art and a couple of photos of the completed Kindle.

Here is a link to a feature engadget did on the etching process and adafruit industries. The etching of the Kindles is towards the end. Also, here's a link to images of the five winning Kindles.

Thanks again!

Superman Shirt

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One of my best friends turned 30 just a little while ago and his wife asked if I could make him a t-shirt. He happens to be a Superman fanatic so I felt it was only fitting to pay homage to his childhood desires. I hear he likes it.

I sketched up what I wanted and then drew it up in Illustrator. Pretty straight forward, but a lot of fun to do. I've been working with Illustrator more and more and am enjoying it. I'll post some more stuff soon!

College of Science Event Video

This week we were asked to make a welcome video for a College of Science event. It was a series of talking heads highlighting the College of Science and welcoming the guest of honor, who is an astronaut.

We shot all the video on green screen and I took the edit provided to me and recut it in After Effects. I took each scene and keyed it out using Keylight and then created the backgrounds and animated key phrases from each person behind the subject. I also created the bloom effect between the cut-a-way shots in After Effects. The whole project was done in HD 1080p.

It was fun to do because I wasn't required to stay within the standard Purdue graphics which is predominantly gold and black in color. So thank you to the college of science for letting me make something different than what I usually make.

2009 Football Fireup Video

I did most of the compositing for the football fireup video this year. Adam Ruud and Brad Sommer did all the 3D model work, including the texturing and animation. Louis Dierckman did the editing of the piece and also added all the footage to the 3D screens in After Effects.

I started by keying out all the green screen footage that Louie edited, then compositing that with the backgrounds and other CG elements that Brad and Adam gave me. I also added all the atmospheric elements and created the computer interfaces you see the players using. Everything was done with Photoshop and After Effects.

Each year I feel I get to learn more about composition and AE. This year was no exception. I worked a lot with using the 3D features in AE and the built in camera to do the focus-pulls and pans. If only I had more projects like this to work on!

Enjoy!