Designers, animators et. al. are a pale, clammy species. Typically found in dark rooms huddled in front of glowing LCD screens for warmth, they subsist on an irregular diet high in complex carbohydrates and red #5, rarely venturing outside save for a occasional mating ritual or visit to a fast food drive-thru for supplies. Yet every now and then, they get a job that forces them outside into the sunlight, and this piece for the BCS Championship was just one of those jobs. Similar to 5 Takes, which was made up entirely of photographs (save for a small bit at the end), this opening piece to the BCS Championship game involved a fair amount of scouting, shooting, and playing a memory game not unlike Concentration.

Frames from BCS Open

The percussive track that mixes marching bands, B.o.B. and Brent Musberger worked far more effectively when married with a series of stills rather than edited moving footage, so we found our "footage" of players, stadiums, crowds, mascots etc. from thousands of images taken through the college season. The graphics needed to follow this construct, so we took it upon ourselves to get out of the office and wander the streets of LA in search of interesting typography and signage. If you don't live in LA (and maybe even if you do) - this city has a LOT of home-made signage. It's easy to miss amidst the clutter of the city, and particularly since we're usually driving right past it and not looking to the side, but if you walk around enough it's a veritable collection of brilliant and naive typography, probably made by people who don't bother discussing the finer points of Helvetica.

Title lockup.

So, we did what most people don't do in LA - we walked. A lot. In doing so we got to know a bunch of neighborhoods in ways we didn't know them before, and we found little pieces of art and detail that we would have never noticed otherwise. The result from this was we took a small boatload of photographs of signage, logos, and any other interesting letters that were scattered about the place, and brought them back in the hopes of making our own type library.

Source images.

After that adventure, we were back at our desks, cataloging, isolating and cleaning up what we shot and creating sequences of each letter and numeral we found. The football photos were cataloged by subject, angle, focal length, and color, then matched together for eye-lines and positioning so that the edits wouldn't become too jumpy. After that, it came down to editing and swapping the odd photo or two to make it right and to be sure that enough teams were well represented. A super fun project, and we even managed to get a slight tan while doing it.

~ Images shot on various cameras, edited in FCP, color correction + graphics in After Effects ~