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.

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.

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 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.

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!

N.U.N.C.H.U.K.S.

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This was a short video made for Young Life to advertise an upcoming ninja club. It was shown in the previous week's club to get the kids excited about everything that involves stealthiness. Again I had the help of Matt Wallace, of the Dodge ball commercial. We thought it'd be fun to to make a commercial for a home ninja correspondence course like the old Sally Struthers diploma at home advertisements.

Matt did the narration with the only exception being the brutally manly battle-cry at the end voiced by me. He also helped with the edit and coming up with a list of all things we believed ninjas needed to be adept at.

I used Photoshop to make the parchment and Premiere Pro to do the editing and text. The old Asian man clip came from the movie Kung Pow: Enter the Fist.

It was a lot of fun to make and all the Young Life leaders got to be involved. Hopefully I'll get to make some more in the future. Enjoy!

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.

Dodge Ball!

In my last post I talked about fun things I've worked on for Young Life so I decided to post a 30 sec. commercial my friend Matt Wallace and I made for a YL event. It's a commercial for an all-area dodge ball tournament that was shown at the various clubs around town leading up to the event. We just thought it would be funny to have some guys training up for the tournament with bad 80's big-hair rock music and cheesy graphics so that's what we made. We shot the whole thing in about 1 hour and edited it that night. Matt did all the vocals and V/O and I edited it and made the graphics. The graphics were all made in after effects and I just used the stock lightening effect which I always found a bit cheesy. Throw in some explosions and in-your-face 3D text and call it a night. Overall the commercial was well received by the kids and the closing "DODGE BALL!" gut-belting lyric that Matt threw in at the end became the de facto rock phrase to yell randomly at clubs the remainder of the year.

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.