Chris DiNicolas Reel 2008 from Chris DiNicolas.

I stumbled upon Chris‘s work while searching Vimeo. I recognize his NFL network interstitials. Beautiful glossy, reflective, lens flares… he’s got it all. I’m guessing Maya, what do you guys think? Fantastic work.

www.chrisdinicolas.com

(more…)

World Series ’08 show open [HD] from FoxSportsGFX on Vimeo.
Very nice job on this.

Presidential rivals John McCain and Barack Obama united to help narrate an opening to the World Series telecast Wednesday highlighting how baseball — America’s pastime — has drawn the country together in challenging times.

Academy Award winning actor Michael Douglas provides the lead narration.

Design/Animation:
Jason Bognacki & Clay Lipsky

Writer/Producer:
Michael Hughes

Sound:
Jim Mitchell

Nice spot from Mode here in Chicago. Also, turns out they work with Sol Sender to come up with the 2008 Obama Campaign logo.

Roman Farias along with Justin Tuazon and everyone else at the Chicago White sox did a great job on this in-game video for game one of the Cubs/Sox series last season. 

Download

I recently got C4D R11 along with Mograph, Advanced Renderer and NET render. Having never used net renderer before, I have to say its awesome. Although when I start using images in my materials it gets a little complicated. Overall, C4D hasn’t changed to much other than its faster and seems to be more stable. Advanced Renderer however has a revamped GI thats amazing. Looks great, and worth the cheap update.

Old news here, but my buddy Ben just found out that mfactor did those sweet lower thirds on Fox’s NFL sunday. Unfortunately, the site is all flash so I can’t link to any of there work directly. But check out it.

Anamorphic Lens flares galore. I (much like sports graphics) am a huge fan of lens flares. So, seeing something like this, that uses them elegantly, is great. I especially like the tiny pieces of particulate matter floating around each scene. Nice stuff.

Another nice BCS animation from Fox Sports Graphics.

This shot reminded me of the tutorial on FXphd After Effects 302 in which they teach you how to comp together a helecopter shot with a few green screened shots of dudes running. I’m not presuming that Fox Sports used the FXphd technique, but if you want to know how to do something close to this. Check it out. 

Really nice process from Justin Bates. Check out his site. I love these kinds of “how-to” or “our process” videos. What the technical term for that? Check out Justin’s C4D section for some great thinking particles inspiration. 

Credits:

Design and 3D Visual Effects – Justin Bates

Senior Flame Visual Effects Artist – Matt Butcher

BskyB Creative

Nice work coming from GGN. The oddly creppy Lions spot is good but they’re new Coke spot is great.