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.

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:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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!

Purdue President Inauguration Backdrop

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I've been working pretty hard on a project that I can't post yet but here's an idea of what I've made for the project's DVD. It's a screenshot of all the after effects compositions I made for the menu's transitions. If you can count how many are there you'll get a prize. So in the meantime I'll post something I made today.

I was asked to make a quick background for the Purdue president's inauguration. It was used as a backdrop for the entire stage. Basically they just wanted something with the Purdue Seal on it. I thought it turned out nice for what it is.

I also found out that my "I am a Boilermaker" poster won a regional Gold Addy award and has been submitted to the national addy awards. I guess it's going up against the major players in advertising now. Wish me luck.

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.