Sorry for the lack of updates lately, I’ve been busy at my day job. I’ve re-designed Bridges Media Group’s website using some of the knowledge I picked up here at GraphicsMafia (they both run on wordpress). So it is with full disclosure that I’m posting our website, we’ve done a few sports related projects (which flash by pretty quick in the Demo Reel) but we currently don’t have any sports related featured projects. Why would I post something un-related to sports? Well, I’m starved for content, and I worked damn hard on that site. So deal with it.

I know NFL spring training is starting up, so there are plenty of people working on in-game features (*cough Chicago Bears *cough) and I know people would really like to see some examples.

Is it just me or does it seem like After Effects gives you more useless error messages than any other program. Every time I use after effects I feel like I’m moments away from either a crash or a prompt to press “ok” to a dialog box of jibberish. I found that mographwiki has been collecting user submitted AE messages. My personal favorite is the now classic question mark. Nothing else… just a question mark and an “ok” button. 

But it’s not all bad. I found a great tutorial for optimizing your AE in response to a very common error. The infamous “Image Buffer” error. Check it out, but use at you’re own risk. Also, I’ve had great success with the secret menu cache settings (see post below for accessing secret menu). Setting it to purge cache after every frame during render, seems to empty out the ram before it moves along to the next frame. Which is very useful. 

Congratulations to all the winners from the Idea Conference. Thanks to everyone who came out and attended any of the classes. Especially those who had kind things to say about my Beginner Photoshop/AE class. I thought I’d post some of the content from that class.

Here is some great work from Gkaster. Thanks for the contribution. I’m told he’s a fellow C4D user. As a novice user myself I’m hoping I can get him to share some of his secrets. I love those reflections, I’m guessing he used the advanced renderer.

I’ve been a long time fan of Lloyd Alvarez, actually of the scripts that he writes on AEscripts.com. Specifically the background renderer that has found its way onto every AE workstation I come in contact with. I had to buy him a beer (or six). 

Looks like Lloyd worked on the ESPN News re-brand with Trollback. (Via motionograher.)

I love looking for inspiration in boards. Too bad this piece isn’t an animation.Usually you get to see a pure idea before is passes through the various levels of approval. Where everyone from the account team to the client’s 5 year old daughter get to decide how to “enhance” your idea and fill in all that “blank” space with more “creativity”. As if creativity is a quantity and simpler design isn’t negative space. Anywho, I’ve had Jon Saunders bookmarked in my boards folder and haven’t checked his site in a long time. Great work. 

I love this piece by Carlo Vega and Adam Gault. Roman, when are we going to see some white sox stuff that looks like this?

I know I’ve been posting some older stuff, but a lot of this I just want to catalog onto the site. Stuff like this Exopolis piece that I know we’ve all talked about for a while. Anywho, shoot me some fresh links.

Nice spot for the NBA featuring Steve Nash. Very simple and clean. Just like the other spots for NBA’s “where amazing happens” campaign. I could see this spot being played during halftime on the big board.

I’m still organizing the site and something like this post should probably be in a different column, but I wanted to let everyone know that a motion graphics opportunity has recently come up.

It would be perfect for someone just out of school (or close to graduation) who needs some real-world work on their reel. It’s not a paying gig, but your work would be seen by every post-production company in Chicago. I’ll say that again… YOUR work would be seen by EVERY post house in Chicago. Not handed over to every company with the hope that they watch it… but, literally forced to watch.

Sound too good to be true? Email me for details and the finest candidate will win.