NBA ALLSTAR 2020

Client: NBA, Turner Sports
Agency: WarnerMedia Studios
Created: 13 March 2020

Role: Motion design, technical artist

Softwares / Tools / Skills used
After Effects, Extendscript automation , Google Sheets, Regex

One of the perks of working at WarnerMedia Studios is getting to work on NBA projects. I was extremely fortunate to be able to work on both NBA All-Star Draft Show and the All-Star itself. My main role in these two projects were mostly putting my automation and Javascript skills to the test in a real-world project.

DRAFT SHOW

As a motion designer working in broadcast, I realized that the real challenge is not to make great design but rather to quickly version out a deliverable several dozen times in a short period of time. The NBA Draft Show was the genesis of my first automation setup. Here are the variables I have to work with:

Player photos
Player names (broken into 2 lines)
Team logos

When it comes to automation, I always begin with preparing a spreadsheet to house my data and variable. This is probably the most important part of automation, and thankfully my one year in the Singapore army using spreadsheets came to fruition at this phase of my career. The second part is writing expressions to have an composition access a specific logo based on a text layer source text which is drawn from the spreadsheet.

On the right, you can watch my tutorial on this concept of “Selecting image with a Text Layer using expressions“.

The last step is to run a script I wrote that basically duplicate a selected composition, change the text layers source text, rename the composition, and repeat for all rows of data in.

DATASET

VERSIONED OUT PLAYER INTERSTITIALS

ALL-STAR INTERSTITIALS

My automation setup proved to be successful for the Draft Show and I was activated to do the same for the All-Star show. There were not many changes in my procedures. The only issue we had was that the blue hex codes from some teams were appearing too dark on tint overlays we had on the footage. I made use of a Google Sheets script by wjmazza who forked it off Pathoschild which adds color preview to cells. This allows me to quickly identify which team had a blue hex code and make the appropriate changes by color picking a more visible blue color.