This piece is for the World Collabs Challenge at Abduzeedo in collaboration with James White of Signalnoise. The intention of the challenge is to work with a great designer’s PSD and apply your own style and twist to it. So check it out!

From Vimeo:

Intro Animation for RIT Sportszone and University News’ coverage of the 2010 NCAA Frozen Four playoffs. I designe the layout and effects in Photoshop, then animated the layers in After Effects. The shatter particles were created in Cinema 4D with 3 different explosion renders and composited into the final animation.

Sound design by Steve Czompo. Created under executive producers Mark Fragale and Steve Wunrow at the Wallace Center ETC Production Services at RIT.

From Vimeo:

30 second intro for the 2010 season of Sportszone Live’s tiger lacrosse coverage. I produced, illustrated and animated the intro with some creative input, illustrations, and single-frame animations from New Media Design students Mike Dennery and Ryan Dixon. A special thanks to Amanda Wade for sifting through and cutting the source footage from last season.

Created at RIT, in The Wallace Center’s ETC Production Services group under executive producers Jim Watters, Steve Wunrow and Mark Fragale.

I used this as an opportunity to try different styles and apply some of the techniques I’ve been building up in the past year from several tutorials (psdTuts in particular) and personal projects, too. While I didn’t quite make it to the voting stage, I still had alot of fun. Below are my final 4 designs as low res version. Full resolution is coming soon.

Abstract

Fractal Sketch

Firey Ring

Painted

First, I blocked out the scene using a big soft brush to plan the overall layout.

Next, I added the sky and water. For the sky I used a series of rough, pastel brushes combined with some soft brushes for shadows and some watercolor brushes for details and complexity.

The sun rays were achieved by merging filtering a layer with “Difference Clouds” and merging it with a layer that I ran the “Add Noise” filter to. I then applied a zoom blur to the merged layer, changed blend mode to screen, and moved and masked it till it looked good.

Here I added the mountains in the background. This was a long process, but was worth it. I made 3 or 4 mountains and scaled and masked them to fit together, then added more and more detail and contrast with a rough pastel brush. I quickly rendered a beach and a background, then painted the trees on top.

I duplicated the previous sun rays layer, scaled it up, and blurred it to add some subtle sun beams in the foreground. For the fog, I duplicated the background clouds layer, tweaked the curves, tweaked the mask and changed the blend mode to screen.

Finally, I added my color correction layers. I added a couple color fill layers at 90% fill and masked them out in certain areas so some of the colors came through. I also added a curves adjustment layer, and added another scanned paper layer over the dragon for more details.

For the overall paper effect, I used different scanned paper images and used multiply and color burn to create a coppery, aged parchment look. I also did an overall noise filter so the different parts would feel more cohesive. Then I just added the text, using some watercolor brushes to give some texture. THAT’S IT!

I actually began the illustration thinking I would portray Dumbledore’s funeral. While it was a sad part of the books, there was still a sense of camaraderie and honor as hundreds gathered to attend. As I began illustrating the scenic background however, I kept returning to the chapter in Deathly Hallows. This made it obvious that the latter had such a strong impact on me that I would have to illustrate that instead.

So I chose the beginning of chapter 27. It follows a long, exhausting ordeal from the previous chapter at Gringott’s bank and starts with stunning imagery and captures the sense of tiredness and preparation for an overwhelming journey ahead. It’s the last time the trio is together before the final, epic events of the books’ finale, so there’s an overwhelming sense of quiet and retrospect.

Here it is! Hope you like it. Click the image for larger version.

The water effect is coming along nicely. I used a reference photo and make a selection of highlights, tweaked them a bit, and converted to black and white to use as a brush. I did the same thing for the lowlights. Then I applied a midtone blue and painted lowlights and highlights on a layer above. Will probably go in by hand later and intensify the contrast in the foreground.

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Here is the start of the project. Once I identified some photography I started blocking the scene out, figuring out the camera angle and the geography. I used some rudimentary masks and retouching to get things looking right. Once everything is blocked out I will start refining the masks, adding some lighting effects, and finally add some details like the shoreline, waves, and maybe some birds or other wildlife.

Stay tuned for progress updates as I get started this week!