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:

A New Way To Do Things

In an effort to make my life simpler I decided to use my Vimeo account to post my videos. I will just embed them from there into my posts. This should also be better for you, the viewer, because it won't navigate you away from the post. I hope this is a suitable solution for everyone.

I also plan on updating all my previous posts to be this way, but it may take a little time.

Enjoy!

"One" Campaign

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I recently was asked by my church to make some PowerPoint slides and some banners for a 4 week series. I was basically left wide open to do whatever I wanted. All that was provided to me were the phrases "one vision" "one commitment" "one hope" and "one confession"

I took those and decided to have the same look and feel throughout, but assigning a color for each week. I wanted the banners to work together slightly so I designed them all as one image and cut them out. That way the background elements would run throughout all 4 banners. The finished banners were 6 x 1.5 feet.

I tend to use a lot of stock images for textures and other elements and really wanted to make everything from scratch for these images. The texture in the background was from using a custom textured brush and varying the size and transparency along with some noise and photoshop clouds layers.

I always enjoy doing this stuff because I'm left wide open to do whatever and I really get to use the opportunity to play around with other styles. For these I would say my influences were Chuck Anderson and James White.

The images above are of the four title slides, one note slide and the banners.

Merry Christmas! ... really late

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So my wife asked me to make a Christmas card this last year. It's the first one I've ever made and quite honestly she kind of drug me kicking and screaming into it. I just ended up waiting until the very last minute and stayed up late making it, when all I really wanted to be doing was playing video games.

After I was done I really liked how it turned out and I'm pretty glad Katie prodded me into making it. I know this post is way after the holiday (don't worry the card itself was done in time to hit the family's mailboxes before the 25th), but I liked it and thought I'd share. Maybe this will kick me into posting some more stuff.

I hope everyone had a great holiday season.

UPDATE: Kindle 2 Design Contest

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So it's finally here! After months of waiting my Kindle 2 has arrived and I love it. It's made me a believer in the digital delivery of books. I want to thank engadget.com and adafruit industries for putting on the contest and all the people who voted for me to win one. I wish I could give you all free kindles as well, but I can't, so deal with it.

In the image link above I'm including my concept sketch that I drew up on the hotel provided notepad while I was in the middle of working a PowerPoint presentation. After that you can see the Illustration line art and a couple of photos of the completed Kindle.

Here is a link to a feature engadget did on the etching process and adafruit industries. The etching of the Kindles is towards the end. Also, here's a link to images of the five winning Kindles.

Thanks again!

Superman Shirt

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One of my best friends turned 30 just a little while ago and his wife asked if I could make him a t-shirt. He happens to be a Superman fanatic so I felt it was only fitting to pay homage to his childhood desires. I hear he likes it.

I sketched up what I wanted and then drew it up in Illustrator. Pretty straight forward, but a lot of fun to do. I've been working with Illustrator more and more and am enjoying it. I'll post some more stuff soon!

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.