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.

Madden Predictions

EA and Madden have been predicting the SuperBowl winners since the 2004 SuperBowl when the New England Patriots defeated the Carolina Panthers. Over that span the computer has gone a very solid 9-3 with their picks, most impressively correctly picking the exact final score of the most recent SuperBowl New England 28 Seattle 24. During this span Madden has also released a video showing what their simulation had happening throughout the game, including, the touchdown plays and big plays from the game. Using the in-game graphics to show how these games play out, Madden has been eerily accurate over the past decade. Every year the graphics of these videos improve along with the game graphics for each Madden, with this years looking incredibly realistic.

As you can see from the clip the textures and backgrounds and almost every single part of the animations of the game are incredibly realistic and show a very high attention to detail. As these animations continue to develop and the graphics for games continue to improve we will get better and better quality SuperBowl prediction videos, eventually it may even be like we are watching real game highlights.

why did it take me so long to discover this song?

One day I was very bored and decided to do a YouTube power hour. It started out with me looking up hockey highlights which led me to football and one of the videos had this song (300 Violin Orchestra by Jorge Quintera) as it's background music. I fell in love with the song. There are no words. Just some great violins and and great beat. I found a cool visual effect video for this song. At first it appeared very simple to me, but as I watched, I found it appeared as though it was growing towards the top of the screen and that it grows and dies in sync with beats in the piece. It's not very complex, but I found it to be very fascinating. Do yourselves a favor watch the video.

This is the video that led me to this masterpiece:

Nice Job Andy

A few days ago, I went down to WENY-TV to talk with them about interning there next semester. I met up with Andy, a former IC grad, and he showed me some of the stuff that they do there. He told me that when I'm there next semester, we'll be covering a lot of high school basketball. He wanted me to get a glimpse at what it will be like so he showed me a reel of high school football from a few months ago. He bragged about how he made the opening in after effects before he showed me the video. I was ready to be blown away with what a TV "professional" could make. Then he showed me the video. Needless to say it was pretty cheesy. You can observe the cheesiness yourselves. Let's just hope I get better with after effects so I can make them a better opening next semester.

Sports Graphics

Lately, I've been editing some football highlight videos for a high school and I've been learning After Effects in class. It's unbelievable how many graphics you see in a day without even trying. All the time on television I watch Sportscenter and I just can't believe how some of the graphics look so sophisticated. As I learn more and more of After Effects, I realize that it really isn't as sophisticated as it looks on television. I looked for some really cool sports graphics to just get ideas of the design of some of them. Like the one I found below, I think this is a really attractive and well done sports graphic. I would like to try to create something like this by the end of the semester.

Videohive Templates

I was browsing some football related animations, and I came across a Videohive After Effects template that was designed to be an easy download allowing anyone to update the text on the animation to personalize the animation to their specific needs. Videohive is a website that is powered by Envato, and they do a lot of templates like this for anyone interested in looking at their downloads.

This specific template I saw was created to be an animation used to introduce a high school foootball team. They used particles of grass blades flying up from the text falling down onto it on a football field, and it is a pretty impressive animation. It's easy to see why someone would want to download it instead of spending so much time creating something themselves, particularly if they were less After Effects-savvy.

Other project files and templates by Videohive can be found here.