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!

On the Horizon

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It's football season again and that means another football fire-up video. One thing we try to do every year is push ourselves further and harder than the previous year. Last season was the first time we tried compositing footage and marrying computer effects with live action.

It was a good learning experience, but there was a lot I personally wanted to improve on. When this year rolled around we decided to continue down our path of CG and compositing and improving upon what we did last year.

Lets just say I'm pumped to finally have background elements to use.

The image above is a little teaser. Come to the game this weekend to see the debut of it! I hope you like it.

Composite Breakdown

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I decided to do a quick composite breakdown in an attempt to explain a little more in depth how the elements went together for the final shot of the 2008 football fireup video. If you watch the video linked to this post you will see 5 passes of the composite plus the final composite as it went to air. This project was really the first time I got to composite something with this many elements and there are things I wish we had more time to work on, but with the constraints in the production schedule we worked with what we had. It took me about 2.5 hours to assemble this entire shot.

Pass 1: Background Plate and Screens

The background is really something that was lacking and we just didn't have time to flesh out so it ended up being just a color ramp. I added some steam elements that rotate around the player because steam was something that found it's way into most of the graphics for the 2008 season. The screens were modeled and animated by Brad Sommer in Maya and textured by Adam Ruud.

Pass 2: Video Corner Pinning

I recived video clips of plays from our editor on the project. I took those and corner pinned the footage to each screen and keyframed them to move with the screens.

Pass 3: Foreground Elements

These were added for two reasons. To add depth and to obstruct the view of the player when we switch shots. The player was composed of 3 separate passes of the actor wearing various stages of the helmet being painted.

Pass 4: Mechanical Arms

These are the arms painting the helmet. They were modeled and animated again by Brad Sommer and textured by Adam Ruud in Maya. All three mechanical arms were rendered together as one pass so I rotoscoped them around the player.

Pass 5: Keyed Player Rotation Footage

We shot the actor in three separate passes, each pass with a different helmet on. We had one helmet that was painted silver, another painted gold, and another gold one with the decals on it. I used the foreground elements to make the transitions between the cuts. This is one area I wish we could have done better. When it was shot the actor just had to guess his stance from the previous shot and try to match it up and I think he did a remarkable job at doing that. Because of this there are slight jumps in his position. I wish we could have devised something for him to hold so that he would have been in exactly the same position. Though I do think for the short production time we had it turned out pretty well.

Pass 6: Final Composite

All the elements put together along with some paint spray.

Ultimately this was a lot of fun to make and I'm looking forward to doing more compositing in the future.

Tiller Roast and Toast

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I know I haven't posted anything new in a while and that's because my wife and I had our first child, an awesome little boy, in December. We're both really excited and are both looking forward to raising him. So I've been a little busy learning the ropes of being a new dad. I had some time off of work for parental leave and I just got back a week or so ago.

This graphic is the first thing I've gotten to make since I've been back to work. I admit I felt a little rusty, but I had a great time making it. Coach Joe Tiller retired from his position as Purdue's head football coach this season and they're honoring him with a Roast and Toast party at the university. They asked me to make a graphic for it and the link above is what I made. I only had a day to make it and overall I was happy with the results.

Enjoy.

2008 Football Fire Up Video

This year for the football opener we wanted to try something we haven't really done before. We wanted to try incorporating 3D animation with live footage that was shot on blue screen.

Brad Sommer spent the better part of a month modeling all the elements in Maya for the video. He had the pieces that we used for props available to him in order to match the CG ones to the physical ones as closely as possible. Scott Horton then directed a shoot with an actor in front of a blue screen over the course of an afternoon using a Sony XD camera in HD. We had three sets of pads in different stages of being constructed and shot scenes multiple times with different combinations of pads.

We then had a couple of weeks to assemble the entire opener. Louie Dierckman edited all the video that appears on the screens and between the shots of the player. Adam Ruud textured all the CG elements in Maya with shaders he wrote. I keyed out all the bluescreen shots and composited all the CG and video together. I used After Effects and Keyframe to key out the footage. I then added the background and the CGI to the shots. I adjusted the lighting and color and tracked the shots together. Finally I cornerpinned the video to the CG screens and created the end graphic that the team walked out too.

Overall this was a fun project to do. We learned a lot in the process and we're looking forward to doing it even better the next time around. Enjoy the opener.

Football 2008 - Spirit Bumper

The 2008 Purdue football season is in full swing and we got the opportunity to create a lot of new graphics for the season. Most of the grahics we create are sponsored elements. This video is what is sold as a spirit bumper. All it consists of is the sponsor logo and some fire up text. In the past all of this stuff was created out of house for us to roll on the LED boards, but this year they came to us to make everything in house. I wanted to do something a little more interesting than the typical one of these which usually is just the logo on some bad background with plain text. I didn't have a lot of time to create these (just a few hours) so I tried to make them as interesting as possible in the amount of time I had. The main thing I changed from what typically is done was to add a motion reveal for the intro. The video below is what I came up with.



Due to the lack of time I purchased the light images online. I composited the rest of the shot together with the text and logo in After Effects. The background was created with a black solid and a couple of lights with the Trapcode Lux filter applied to them to make them volumetric. I added a stock video of the steam to add some motion. The logo and text I animated in After Effects in 3D space. The text has a glow filter on it. I used another layer of text behind it to create the dark rays in the light by applying Trapcode Shine and changing the color to black. I then changed the layer type to multiply to have it blend with the background. There is a separate light on the logo and text to illuminate it accordingly.

Enjoy.

Upcoming Project

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I know I haven't posted in a long while. That's because I've been busy working on the upcoming football season. I'll write up a good in-depth post when we're done with the project, but for now you'll just have to make due with a couple of rough still composites of the project.

Enjoy!

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!

Football Pregame Roll

This is a small snippet from the Purdue football pregame rolls that air on game day. They're basically a series of messages that roll on the LED wall. The frame was modeled in Maya by Brad Sommer. The content slides and compositing were done by me in Photoshop and After Effects. Everything we created for these rolls loop and were designed to be pieced seamlessly together in editing software.

Blast from the Past FINAL

I said in a previous post that I'd update the blast from the past video with a final render when done. Well we finished them so here's the final product. If you've been to any Purdue football games you've seen this on the jumbotron.

Purdue Football Poster FINAL

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So I know I haven't posted in a while. That's because I've been swamped at work and haven't had the energy to do so. Well, I hope to remedy that in the coming weeks and I'll start here with this. The final design for one of the Purdue football recruitment posters.

I played around with a bunch of different slogans and variants of the text and ultimately decided to go simple and just have "I am a boilermaker" on the poster. I sometimes struggle with combining the image with the logo and text elements, wanting the image to just say it all, but overall I feel these play well together.

As you can see I added the crossing hammers logo on the poster. I guess we're hoping this becomes a standard Purdue athletics logo and by branding everything we make with it, we'll achieve that goal. It worked for Purdue Pete (the boilermaker special is the official mascot) and we're hoping it'll work for us. Enjoy.

You can go to this post to see a little more on how I assembled the poster.

2007 Football Commercial

We were asked to make a 30 second commercial for 2007 football season tickets. The client asked for a simple football edit with a 3-2-1 countdown and information at the end. Below is what we came up with.

Brad Sommer made the train animation at the beginning in Maya. Louis Dierkman edited the video, Adam Ruud created the lower 3rd in Maya, and I created the countdown and end information in After Effects. We then took all the elements and composited them together in After Effects and added the grunge and camera shake. I also helped with the overall "look" and created the text for the Highlighted home games.

We were pleased with the final product. Hope you enjoy.

2007 Football Posters

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We were asked this year to create some posters for the Purdue football team. This is one that I worked on today and is in progress. It still needs text and logos applied and I'm still working on the overall look and may possibly change the sky. I took the pictures of the player, stadium and sky and composited them together in Photoshop.

[update]
I was asked by our creative director to add shoulder pads to the player that we originally shot without pads. He put on a pair of shoulder pads and a jersey that we have in the office and we shot a picture of him trying to match the light as best we could. I then took that image and cut out the pads and added them to the original image that I took. I also had to change the numbers on the shoulders to match the number of the player. Above is a link to the updated poster.

Blast from the Past

This is the first piece we've made for the upcoming Purdue football season and I'm excited about the way the whole look turned out. This piece is a 'guess the year' type of thing that will run during football games on the new LED wall Purdue is installing. Scott Horton is the creative director this season and he wanted a 300 look with some steampunk elements and this is what we created. Scott edited the little video in Premiere Pro that plays during the piece highlighting the events that happened that year. Adam Ruud and I created the base frames in Photoshop that surround the elements. Brad Sommer created the title and spinning numbers in Maya. And I assembled the whole piece in After Effects. To do that I edited the frames created by Adam in Photoshop so they would work the way I needed them to for the piece. I created the background in Photoshop. I then took all the elements assembled them in After Effects and put 3D motion to them and added a camera, lights, shadows, and color correction. I then animated all the pieces to create what you see below.



[ note: this is a rough version. the motion blur was turned off to shorten render time and the voice-over is a temporary one until we get the real one recorded. I'll update the video when we have a completed piece ]