Excellence in Awesomeness

My friend, JC Trombley, and I were talking one day about how we'd love to have something that would drive us to make all the crazy ideas we often would talk about, but not take the time to produce. Through these conversations we decide to create Excellence in Awesomenss, a place where we can post work that we make for ourselves in our own styles and explore art and design in the ways we find interesting. For me that means the ability to create things that aren't branded with Purdue University and can use colors other than gold and black. This is exciting for me. Gold and black lurk in my nightmares.

We have a lot of ambitions for this page and are working on a plan to roll out everything at some point, but first we'll start with a blog format where we can post our process and final work and gather feedback from whomever feels the need to espouse knowledge upon us.

We are working on getting the site up and running as I write this and wanted to give you a heads up.

Here is the link: excellenceinawesomeness.com

Here is a wallpaper: PURE AWESOMENESS!

Christmas 2010

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So I know it's been a bit since I posted last. It's not because I haven't been up to anything. On the contrary, I've been up to many things. First of which being adding a new member to my family. A daughter named Ada. She joined us on December 30th and life's been twice as hectic since.

One of the things I was able to get done right before she came around was to create this year's family Christmas card. This was sent before baby number two so that explains her absence on the card. For some reason my wife let me do whatever I wanted and was even on board with the angry picture thing. Maybe she thinks I'm a genius, but most likely she was nine months pregnant and had other things on her mind. We'll know for sure when next year rolls around and I pitch my next idea to her.

I created the card in Illustrator and added the photos in Photoshop. I drew slight inspiration from Olly Moss. Mainly just using a couple of colors and solid shapes.

Enjoy and Merry Christmas.

Twitter Page Background

i decided to finally sit down and customize my twitter page which is basically making a background and applying it.

i have never really tried to make a complex tiled background for a webpage and decided this would be a good opportunity to do it. i wanted to make an exclamation/talking/blurb type background to fit in with what twitter is all about so i settled on making a few word bubbles and arranging them into a texture.

i began by creating the word bubbles in illustrator and then bringing them into photoshop and using the offset filter to create the seamless wrap. honestly it turned out to be easier and more fun than i expected.

the tile is below and you can see it in use on my twitter page here. hopefully the colors don't make your eyes bleed. be warned.

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.

Epic Mix Tape

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One of my coworkers recently moved to Texas. She asked all of us to make her a mix tape with some of our favorite songs for the drive. I took the opportunity to make it a graphics challenge with everyone involved. In order to win I decided to make the artwork on the disc as epic as possible, even if the songs didn't quite reflect what was depicted in the art. The result was an explosion coming out of a crater with lighting coming out of the ash all tied together with some heavy metal text in pastel colors. ROCK!

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: