Camera Shake with Wiggle

In an attempt to better familiarize myself with the ins-and-outs of After Effects, I've been doing my best to sit down a few times a week to play around with the program and practice different tutorials, outside of our class assignments. Last week, I was looking through some of the beginner-type tutorials offered on Video Copilot when I cam across this:

Obviously, the effect is not something terribly complex. However, at home I work as content creator for the Buffalo Bisons (Triple A Affiliate of the Blue Jays), so this caught my attention as something to apply to my own work. And because I always have endless amounts of baseball footage to play with on my drive, I thought I'd give it a go. Here is what I ended up with:

The idea of the effect is to create the perception of power. Most of my shooting I use simply a monopod in order to be most mobile when following play action. If, though, I used a tripod and got steadier footage the effect would probably do an even greater job of highlighting that impact.  I definitely think this is a cool trick to potentially enhance my work.

Sports Graphics

Seeing as last Sunday was the Superbowl, I figured this week would be an appropriate time to talk about motion graphics in terms of sports. With lower thirds, wipes, bugs, and boards, sports is consistently paving the way with innovative motion graphics and animation.

As part of my internship last summer, I worked on broadcasts of the Cape Cod Baseball League for Fox College Sports. Before the first game, one of my responsibilities was to export the alpha transitions they would use to go to replay for our switcher in our truck. However what I found the most interesting about the graphics was how they did the score bug. There are many different ways to do score bugs. Here at Ithaca College on our football and basketball broadcasts for Bombers Live, we use a channel of our Chyron, a two channel character generator. However, this is not really ideal since it then takes away a channel that could be used for other things like lower thirds. At my internship, Fox actually sent us their own proprietary system called a FoxBox. This was a computer with software that would let you type in the score and the would output a key and fill channel to the switcher. The machine is also smart enough to know that three strikes make an out and other rules of the game. But what I think was probably the coolest thing about it was the fact that it had a serial data input that would read data from a radar gun and output the speed of the pitches. Fox isn't the only network with systems like these. Most others have similar things. Daktronics, the major company who manufacturers scoreboards also has equipment that allow you to take a feed from the scoreboard and use that in your broadcast.

Doc Ellis and The No Hitter

It's becoming clearer as time goes on that After Effects is a program that you can basically do anything with. There are simply are no restrictions to what you can do with it. I've been interested to see what kind of animation you can do by importing Photoshop images into AE and playing around. One video that inspired me to start this is Doc Ellis and The No Hitter. Shown to me by a friend, it's a hilarious account of a professional baseball player pitching a no hitter while on the drug LSD.

I think this animation is absolutely hysterical. The use of very simple effects, great sound, and a rare radio interview really adds up to a fantastic animation. The style of using these frozen stills instead of fluid characters is perfect for this story. When I rewatched this a week ago, I realized that this can all be done using the Adobe suite. By importing Photoshop files and animating them with AE, this style is easy to achieve. The mix of black and white to color is most apparent in my favorite scene when they show the rookie "Dave Cash." Or "I'm high as a Georgie Pine!" I would love to find an audio file from an interview so I can animate the visuals and bring to life someone's story. Great stuff.