Major League Teams Score Big With Particleillusion

(January 2007)

Living in St. Louis, we enjoy attending St. Louis Blues professional hockey games. At each event we've attended, we remain impressed with the state-of-the-art graphics on the main scoreboard at the Scottrade Center and noticed how the onscreen visual effects serve to enhance spectator enjoyment of the game. We also noticed that our very own particleIllusion software application was being used throughout the game to animate player stats, historical data, highlight key plays and replays, etc.

Looking through the wondertouch customer database we realized that quite a few major league team franchises throughout the country are relying on our software. In this piece, we've contacted several artists, both in-house and at external facilities, connected with teams in the Midwest to ask how they are using particleIllusion to add excitement to stadium, broadcast and television content.

Pickett Productions

St. Louis-based Pickett Productions, Inc. is a full-service computer art, animation and video studio. For years particleIllusion has been incorporated into the production pipeline at PPI alongside Adobe AfterEffects, Maya Unlimited, 3DStudio Max, Combustion, Avid/DS Nitris and Avid. The software is used on an ongoing basis to create various motion graphics and effects work including projects for area professional sports teams including the St. Louis Cardinals, the St. Louis Blues and others.

Jeff Pickett, the founder of the studio and a computer artist and animator, says that the facility's work on behalf of the two professional teams requires that they provide exciting and visually interesting graphics and animation that help create and maintain the teams brand identity and encourage fan participation and retention. "particleIllusion allows us to quickly create proprietary effects that look visually exciting and are easy to integrate into our animations without having to spend major amounts of time on R&D. We consider particleIllusion a primary tool in the company's production pipeline that we could not get along without," says Pickett. "For the current opening that plays before each of the St. Louis Blues games we created a 3D animation of a hockey player made-up entirely of blue-note particles with swirling motion trails and special effects. For the St. Louis Cardinals, particleIllusion was also one of the key ingredients used to create particle trails, logo enhancements and special effects for many of the player introductions, attendance quizzes, play-by-play and running board animations."

One of the lead animators at Pickett Productions, Carl Braun, has completed work for both the Cardinals and the Blues. He uses a version of particleIllusion that runs within Autodesk's Combustion to further enhance his creative capabilities and eliminates the need to move from one program to another. This approach speeds up work-flow and provides access to the powerful particleIllusion effects during the crucial stage of compositing.

"Much of the time, I just need to create an explosive effect or a starry trail of sparks such as after an electric blast or light burst. This is where particleIllusion really hits the mark for me. I can quickly experiment and work up particle effects in real-time which come in handy during supervised sessions. This gets me instantaneous feedback and client approvals faster so that I don't have to scramble at the end of the project making revisions," says Braun. "With the real-time capabilities in particleIllusion, I can quickly tweak or entirely change effects to suit the director or client. Whether I'm making fairy sparkles, smoke from a dragon's nostril or foot stomp, vintage film-looks or animated text effects, particleIllusion is a really solid accent tool that saves us time and has become virtually indispensable."

Ryan Bury, editor at PPI, uses the stand-alone package of particleIllusion 3 to compliment the many effects filters and powerful graphics capabilities of the Avid/DS Nitris. Ryan often needs to create animation and special effects over film and video during time sensitive edit sessions. The power and speed of particleIllusion broadens his toolset with fast, unique and dazzling effects. Ryan says, "The availability of real-time previewing of the extensive emitter libraries, gives me the speed to select from an infinite range of creative options for any project. Not only does particleIllusion allow me to expand our emitter library through its free monthly emitter downloads, but particleIllusion allows me to customize and adjust the tiniest of details for my specific needs. The properties of each effect are easy to comprehend and provide a variety of options to create a unique style."

Chicago White Sox

Roman Farias, a graphic producer and video editor in the Scoreboard Operations Department at the Chicago White Sox major league baseball franchise says particleIllusion has been in use for the past two years to create graphics and effects footage for on-air television promotions as well for U.S. Cellular Field's main centerfield "exploding" scoreboard, concession area video stations and in-house stadium suites.

"Throughout the history of the White Sox game play, after a player hits a homerun and after a White Sox victory, the scoreboard explodes with colored lights. In keeping with tradition, and based on live action from every play of the game, we customize and configure particleIllusion's libraries of effects, such as explosions, flares and other animated elements, to announce winning scores, player stats, transitions and wipes in conjunction with replay moves, sponsor messages, and more."

Farias explains that before players enter the field, video intros of the team members appear on the main centerfield score board accompanied to AC DC's "Thunderstruck" - designed, he says, to 'pump-up' the fans. "Making opens for the home games is a lot of fun. Typically there is at least 8 seconds of animation and we need software that will allow us to quickly render realistic effects and easily control the size and color and other aspects of the effects elements," says Farias.

"Using particleIllusion alongside some other major applications including Sapphire Plug-ins, Adobe After Effects, Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator allows us to easily change parameters such as the size and dimensions of the effects, and keep team theme and colors consistent."

Chicago Bears

For the past three football seasons, particleIllusion has been in use at the Chicago Bears franchise in the Chicago Bears Broadcasting department where it is used to create effects for the 'Bears Gameday Live' pre-game show, the 'Bears Gamenight Live' broadcasts - a full half hour of game coverage and analysis - and for scoreboard graphics.

According to Rommel Paraiso, graphic designer/producer at Bears Broadcasting, particleIllusion was adopted into the production pipeline as an affordable solution for rendering particles and compositing them in After Effects.

"For our "Bears Win" animations and for creating general animated backgrounds, particleIllusion affords us tremendous flexibility in being able to quickly select pre-set fire, smoke, lighting and fireworks emitters that we can quickly preview in real-time and render out final images for broadcast on the Solider Field LED ribbon panels and video boards. We find its overall performance has been a big boost to our production workflow."

United Center/Chicago Blackhawks & Chicago Bulls

The United Center in Chicago is the stadium home to professional hockey and basketball teams the Chicago Blackhawks, and the Chicago Bulls, respectively. The internal Scoreboard Graphics Department at the United Center is responsible for creating graphical content for such things as player intros and spots and sponsor animations that are broadcast during and after the games on the stadium's LED panels and scoreboards.

According to Jeremy Frye, motion graphics designer, particleIllusion 3.0 on the Windows XP operating system has been in use in the department for the past several years. "Our work creating sports graphics effects requires us to generate a good deal of particles on an ongoing basis to achieve the high energy look that comes with the territory. Adopting an affordable, high end particle generator, like particleIllusion, just makes sense," says Frye.

"The process of creating effects varies a lot. Sometimes an animation is built with a certain particle in mind and other times it is used for details that adds depth and that "wow" factor after the animation is finished.

"Recently, in order to generate a very dramatic explosion of fireworks for some pre-game stats, we produced numerous particles that were 'lumped' into certain emitters to achieve a certain look. In a production environment where tight deadlines are typical, particleIllusion's quick render and preview times and the ability to alter the presets by redefining color and the actual properties of particles, helped us achieve our goal," he added.