Three Fight December

Here’s a quick promo for 3 fights coming up on Main Event Pay-Per-View in December. It will soon be Summer here in Sydney so for the color grade I went for a golden-orange look. This was done using the new Magic Bullet Looks. I was able to create the initial look quickly and easily by modifying a preset, then save as a preset and apply it to the other shotsin the sequence, fine-tuning where necessary. You’ll notice in the comparison movie that many of the boxing shots are 4:3 leaving ugly black pillarboxing to deal with. I disguised this by duplicating the graded footage, scaling it and comping it back on top of itself with soft, feathered mask. Here are the effects I used to colorize the duplicate. This not only disguises the black bars but becomes an important part of the overall look of the spot.

The text was created in ProAnimator using a font named “Champion”. This is a cool font for boxing and other sports promos – the different font weights even have boxing weight division names – cool. To create the look for the text I used 2 ProAnimator layers comped together in After Effects – a glass version and a wireframe version. The glass version was textured using a bump map and this was inspired by the graphics I created for the Making it Look Great promo.

Once I created the glass text object I duplicated the ProAnimator layer and switched out the text to create the rest. Once that was done I duplicated each ProAnimator layer and then used the Wireframe texture mode on the top layer. Combining the glass layer and the wireframe version in this way gives the text more detail and general coolness. I further enhanced the wireframe versions using the Glow effect, and this was set to glow on the vertical only, which gives some subtle vertical streaking. I also animated the glass layer’s Opacity up from zero at the start so that at first all we see is the wireframe then the glass fades in as it gets closer to the viewer.

To have it appear that light was passing over the text I used ProAnimator’s Layer Map Offset feature — very handy for preventing the text from looking “dead”, particularly when it has stopped moving. I linked the Offset of the wireframe layer to the keyframed glass layer using a simple expression.

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