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!

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!

2008/09 Basketball Headshots

This is an example of the headshots I made for this season of Purdue basketball. I was asked to make a motion headshot that had a grungy newspaper look so I dove into after effects and started to create something. We shot a bunch of footage of the players in front of a blue screen with our HD XDCAM. I digitized the footage and keyed it out using keyframe in AE. I took the footage and exported it out of AE using the filmstrip file format and imported it into Photoshop and applied a halftone filter to it. I then brought that footage back into AE and added to my comp in progress.

I then proceeded to flesh out the rest of the information by adding in the name, position, home town, etc. At around this point I stopped and took a look at what I made. Although I liked where it was headed, I didn't feel the look was fitting the look of the graphics for the season. It was turning a little too much into a western wanted poster. After talking it over with the art director we decided to scrap it and start with something new. Below is the work in progress of the version I scraped and ignore some of the text placement. I didn't actually get everything placed where I wanted it.



After talking it over more with the art director he suggested I base the headshots off of another headshot I made for the preseason opener. Below is a still image of that design.


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I took the elements from the above graphic and some ideas I liked from my original headshot and created the final one. I again used AE to key out the footage and animated it all in AE as well. The headshot comes in over video and the begining and end is transparent. The video below is the final version.

Sports Graphics Reel

This video is a sampling of all the sports graphics we made for football and basketball last year. We're gearing up to start conceptualizing the look of this upcoming football season and I thought this edit was a very good look back at the variety of graphics we made.



The edited piece was cut together by Scott Horton. All the graphics were a collaborative effort and most of the ones I worked extensively on are already shown in past posts.

Enjoy!

Kiss Cam

This is a segment that runs during the games and the winning couple gets a free meal to the sponsor's restaurant. I tried to keep with the theme this year and created the heart with neon lights. I made the lights and heart in Photoshop and added the effects in After Effects. I made the heart composition 32 bit float so the neon would really glow and pop. I rendered that out and then put it in a 8 bit comp for the rest of the piece.

It runs in 3 parts, but I assembled them all together for this.

2007 Basketball Head Shots

We were asked to keep the same theme from football and carry it over to basketball. So one of the common threads migrating from our football graphics is the metal and steam background. I used that in combination with new elements to create the head shot seen below.



The spinning transition was modeled and textured in Maya by Brad Sommer and given to me as stills. Everything else in the head shot I created in Photoshop and animated in After Effects.

Men's Basketball Season Highlights

We were asked by the basketball department at Purdue to create a season highlights roll for the end of season banquet. We worked with our producer and came up with interesting shots to fill in the timeline and I was asked to come up with a way to ID the 12 players. Scott Horton, the editor, asked if I could make them with a film look. Below is what I came up with.

The game opener is in black and white so I tried to keep some of the desaturated look of the it. With all the work we have going on I only had one day to create the graphics and I think in the end I spent 14 hours creating all 12 id's. I would have liked to create variations of the look, with different in's and out's and having the filmstrip in different locations, but with the lack of time, I could only create the one look you can see below.

As far as what I used to create the graphic, it was the standards - Illustrator, Photoshop and After Effects. Enjoy!

Mens Basketball Fire-Up

Over the last couple of years we've had the opportunity to create fire-up videos for the Purdue men's basketball team. Basically these videos play before the players run onto the court to begin the game. The intention is to fire-up the crowd and get them ready for the team. In the past, due to time restraints and budget, we've always been forced to basically do clip shows of past big plays from game footage. This year we had some time to work a little more on the piece and we created what's above.

The idea is the preparation the team does to get ready for the game.. the practice, the pain, the dedication, etc. One thing we've been limited to with video is the lack of good slow motion. It's not like film where you can just shoot more frames and play them back at normal speed. Enter NAB 2006. At the conference Sony introduced the XDCAM format. This allowed us to shoot in the HD format in true slow-motion. Since it uses a digital interface and not analog, the camera is basically writing files and frames so you can over and under-crank the footage. At least this is how I understand it to work... remember I'm a graphics guy, not an engineer. Anyways, we were eager to do something with slow motion so we shot the piece over a couple of practices using the Sony XDCAM and edited it in a few days. I, along with a co-worker, shot all the footage and Scott Horton, the editor put it together into the piece you see below.



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Along with the opener video we created supporting graphics to fill the screens that hang around the court. These LED walls have just been blacked out in the past seasons so this year we wanted to make support grapihcs to video. The idea was to focus on the chorus of the song, but not be distracting. The main focus should be the video itself. I made the graphics in a day with photoshop and after effects.