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.

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.

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.

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:

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.

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.

Convocations 2009 DVD Opener

For the Convocations 2009 season preview DVD we were asked to do something with kinetic text. Although I've seen a lot of uses of kinetic text in various commercials or on YouTube, I've never had an opportunity to make something using this technique. When Convocations came to us wanting to do this I was pretty excited to try it out.

Based on what Convocations wanted we decided to keep the movement simple and just focus on the message rather than a lot of flashy movements. Because of this I restricted most movement to the X and Y axis and kept the color pallet in line with their seasonal brochure, which happened to be rather muted with hints of color.

Convocations provided me with audio and music bed that I used to base all the text and movement off of. They also provided an outline of specific elements they wanted to see (the falling/raising stock line for example). I took the audio file and placed it in Adobe Premiere and used a new feature in CS4 that transcribes all the audio into meta data and places it at the appropriate time code. I then made whatever tweaks it needed and saved it out to bring into After Effects. Using another new feature in AE CS4 I imported the audio file and AE placed layer markers for every word of dialogue onto the audio layer based off of the meta data from Premiere. This allowed me to have precise timing for the words appearing and also allowed me to see visually what word was being spoken at what time on the waveform. I then proceeded to animate the camera/text to the timing of the voiceover. Check out the opener below.



I was also asked to make three short segments highlighting the pick 5 option for that season. Convocations had a few ideas for them and below are the ones that I created.










Overall this was a lot of fun to do and was a fun learning experience. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 ]