The local Denver commercial landscape firm Western Proscapes, Inc. hired me to refurbish their ailing website. They requested a flash site (for some strange reason), and i worked extensively with their very specific design ideas to create a site that they were quite fond of.

Check it out at westernproscapes.com.

I’m officially a graduate of the University of Colorado at Boulder. I now have a BS in Journalism (which seems appropriate since journalsim is 90% b.s. anyway), and a shiny new Technology, Arts, and Media graduation certificate (with honors).

No sooner am i done with college than–WHAM–i’m working. Engineering at FSN Rocky Mountain.

Process point six: 3D logo work

One of the coolest parts of this project was getting to work with some of the 3D elements I included. The CU logo was the obvious choice, and I (convieniently) had a copy of it in a vector format. The process for this is (relatively) simple.

-Modify your vector image in Adobe Illustrator, making sure all the different parts of the image that you want to be editable are located on separate layers. Also, it is best if you move all the same colors to the same layer, as this will make it easier later in the process. Use the “pathfinder” utility in Illustrator to combine as much of the logo as you can into one continuous vector shape.

-Save this file as an Illustrator 8 file (this took me FOREVER to figure out), not as a new snazzy CS3 file. This is simply a compatibility problem inherent in the After Effects plug-in we will be using in the next step.

-Open After Effects and create a new Solid. Go to the effects menu and select Zaxworks 3D Invigorator. There are lots of plug-ins that can create 3D images in After Effects, I just happened to have the Zaxworks product. The Invigorator dialogue box should pop up and walk you through the rest, allowing you to import that newly created Illustrator 8 file into the system.

-Inside the plug-in you can fiddle with every thing to make the 3D object look and feel the way you want it. Here is a little screen shot of the CU logo, being worked on in a chunky low-res way to streamline my work flow.

As you can see, the colors I separated into layers before are now separately editable objects that I can change depth, color, and texture for. This allows the black portions to pop out of the gold portions, and allows me to add a beveled edge to the gold portion only.  Here is a screen shot of the materials selection menu, it allows you to select the material your object is made from. I chose a high-gloss color scheme, although you could choose any color and any level of gloss. 3D invigorator also supports transparent or semi-transparent objects.

For my spinning logo, I merely put the object on a timeline and added a rotation of 359 degrees. In order to make the spinning look seamless, you have to get rid of that 360th degree or else the logo appears to stall or stutter. Since 0 degrees is equal to 360 degrees, it makes sence to eliminate the 360th degree when you want a logo to spin cleanly from 359 degrees back to 0. I know it is knit picky, but it really makes a difference in the final product.

Once I rendered out one full rotation of the logo, I was ready to place it in the other compositions. I wanted this spinning logo to essentially take the place of a transition, flying in from in front of the ‘camera’ and exiting right back to where it came from. This allowed me to change compositions cleanly and link them together with a unique and eye catching graphic. In a football game senerio, this would also be important as a transition from an instant replay or other graphic.

After a final render, I accumulated all the clips into a central file and added a sound track. In this case it was “Velvet Snow” by the Kings of Leon. I picked that song simply because it was the lightest and happiest song that I had on my computer that fit the two minute composition length. Works great and sets the mood.

I hope this overview has helped you understand the process I went though. If you have any questions or comments please feel free to leave them in the comment section directly below each post or email me at grant.mcgilvray@colorado.edu

Process point five: Starting Lineup

The process for creating the starting line up starts in the same way the head shots do. I took the same light streak images into Photoshop and created a framing template that would include four individual “team members”. My mock-up just contains myself.

Once I had that look created to my satisfaction, I again moved it into After Effects. This is where the process starts to differ. Working with four different pieces of footage creates some complications, and it took me a while to wrap my head around this added step. Before I added in the four different people, I completed a rough-draft with repetitions of my footage. That rough-draft can be seen here.

As you can see, I utilized a freeze-frame type look to freeze the players not being introduced. When the player gets introduced, that player jumps to the front. This means I had to duplicate the footage multiple times and stop and start footage as it was used. One of the trickiest parts of this process was using the “time remapping” capability of After Effects. This tool allows you to place key frames throughout the duration of the clip, and then move those keyframes closer together or farther apart to change the relative speed that the clip plays. This was an essential part of this project, as this process allows you to freeze a frame of video and then start the clip again before once more freezing it.

I treated the innitial “frozen” frames with a de-saturation filter to make them gray scale, which further separated the player being introduced from the people in the background.

Process point four: Individualizing

Now that I had the template made, all I had to do was treat the rest of the footage with Key Light and import it into the project. The green screen footage used for this section was shot in two parts, the first being the look-up-cross-arms section in the beginning, the second being the turn-around-catch-ball section in the end. I split these two sections up after importing, made sure they were still being masked, and timed them out to switch right as the light explodes around them (an effect made possible by another plug-in called Knoll Light Factory). Once I had the footage in there, I changed the text and added the composition to the render que. I would wait to render all these at once, since rendering is CPU intensive and I didn’t have time to just wait around.

I ran into a few things I needed to change after I reviewed the rendered footage, and made appropriate changes to the individual composition before re-rendering. This was a time-intensive process, since there is no real way to get a complete full frame RAM preview in After Effects on my diminutive laptop. I mostly worked in half to quarter resolution with 50% screen size to quicken the process, and relied on these periodic renderings to check for full resolution quality.

Process point three: adding some action

After importing the Photoshop file into After Effects, I could then start adding the motion elements that would make this project pop. The first thing I did was take out the still shot I was using as a placeholder and add in the green screen footage. This footage had to be treated to get rid of the green, and I used a plugin called Key Light (not the beer, guys). It offers some very simple controls that process the image down into something rather professional. It takes a bit of finagling with screen strength, edge softness, key color, and other controls, but once I had the first piece of footage looking good I could just cut and copy the effect on to the other class mate’s footage. Here are some images from the green screen process:

The image on the left is the unprocessed footage, the image in the middle is the key that tells the program what parts of the frame are wanted, and which parts can be discarded. In this case, anything black is discarded by the program. The Image on the right is the final image, with the green screen eliminated. The back sections of that frame are actually transparent, but the background color of the project was in this case black.

The next step was to create a mask that allowed only portions of the footage to peek through. I wanted the “player” to be standing behind some of the light swooshes, and have some of the light streaks wrap around them. By putting the light streaks on multiple layers above and below the footage, I was able to create that effect. When I created the mask, I made sure to follow the line of the light streak so as to make the footage disappear behind the light streak.

The next process was adding the name and position titles. For this, it was important to remember the action safe and title safe areas of the frame. Looking at the image below, you can see the action safe and title safe markers.  Due to the nature of  televisions and other display boards, the fringes of the frame may or may not be present. Some older CRTs disregard a significant chunk of this data, but most newer LCD or flat panel screens show every pixel. Some screens can actually show EVERY bit of information, including the binary stream above the top row that feeds the close captioning content. In any case, I made sure that my titles were within the title safe area, and the majority of my action was within the action safe area.

Once I made the text template, I added motion to it. After Effects allows anchor points to be “eased in” and “eased out”, and this movement can be mathmaticaly controlled for exponential speed. These expressions are also useful in other aspects of the creative process. By adding a “wiggle” function to the opacity levels on some of the light layers, I was able to make that flickering appearance. The wiggle function also made that slight jitter that some of the layers display.

The last bit of creation was adding a fractal noise pattern to the background lights. That cloudy look you can see in the image above is actually a random fractal noise pattern that can be set to evolve through a random growth and change cycle. This created that moving wavy look in the background and really darkened the image in the way I envisioned this looking. After adding a faint Colorado banner moving across the background, I was ready to start making the individual head shots.

Process point two: How am i doing it?

So I had the scope of the project, now I had to have a creative way of presenting the information. The first think to remember is that this project would be created in Adobe After Effects (AE), which works seamlessly with Adobe Photoshop. I would create some visual mock-ups in Photoshop and then import them directly into AE, layers and all. Then I could swap out static elements for motion elements, or add motion to static pieces. In order to start working in Photoshop I would need a still-shot example of the video we would eventually be using. For that, I took a still frame from the AE footage of myself I shot in front of a green screen. I removed the green background (a process I’ll visit later) and imported the image into Photoshop for mock up.

In my research, I noticed that most of the head shot graphics were crisp and clean. While that look has benefits, I wanted to create something a little more edgy, dark, and for lack of a better word…grungy. And since the semester schedule didn’t work well with the football season, I ruled out actual video board display during a football game. With this in mind, I set out to create something outside the norm.

The first thing I found were some royalty free light-streak images. I used those images and layered them on one another, utilizing various blending modes to create a cool way to frame the player video. (example) After throwing some text in there, I was ready to move my project into After Effects.

As the due date for this project nears, I will be writing a series of explanatory posts to help walk you though the process I went through to complete this project. I hope this will shed some light on a process that was completed behind closed doors outside of class (deep in an underground bunker by an army of elves).

Process point one: What am i doing?

I had to first think of a general concept and scope of this project. During my stay at CU, I was employed by the BuffVision program within the Athletic Department, and while I was interested in creating some in-game content for the 2008-2009 football season I realized the quantity of work required was too much. So, I scaled down my project to creating a “head shot” look for player introductions, and a starting line-up series introducing the whole group.

Talking with the director of BuffVision, Deric Swanson, I limited each head shot to roughly 10 seconds, and the starting line-up series to roughly 15 seconds. This is the general attention span of the average fan, and keeping the length down makes it easier to insert the clips in between plays during the game. So, what could I do with 10 seconds? The parameters were set, and all I had to do was create an interesting visual presentation. I set to work researching the head shots from various teams and from years past (Check out Podcast One in the links section for some examples).

I know my in-class presentation wasn’t very informative or impressive, but i have PROOF that I’ve been working. Check out these screen shots! Also, I do have some drafts up on my server space here.

I finally got around to working on this project. After some poking around, I’ve realized that After Effects works seamlessly with Photoshop, so I CAN create content in Photoshop after all. Here is a basic head shot mock-up. Still needs some tweeking, but it’s definitely different from the other examples I’ve researched.