Aid to Injured Riders (AIR)'s Charlotte Snapchat Filter

Last weekend was the AMA Pro Flat Track Grand National Championship race in Charlotte, NC. The race was held at the Dirt Track in Charlotte and was a really great event from start to finish. I personally love that area, it's booming, a well-kept city and is centered around racing. This year Nicalee of Aid to Injured Riders (AIR) came to me with an idea for the non-profit. Since it was such a success in OKC, she proposed designing another Snapchat filter for this racing event. Charlotte has a bit of history within the flat track community and is home to one of the greats, the late Will Davis. Not only was Winkin' Will Davis extremely well-known within the flat track community, he was by far my favorite racer to watch growing up as a kid going to races with my dad. His life was taken at a race in 2001 at Sedalia, MO, and the flat track family took a huge loss that day. The following year Davis' number plate and boot print were added to the grounds at the Charlotte Dirt Track and his legacy lives on. With all of that, Nicalee's goal was to have the Snapchat filter link to Will Davis in some form.

That direction was simple enough, it was finding time to come up with something great that was more of a challenge. One evening I took a pen to paper and sketched and image of Will Davis racing from a quick online photo search. From there I tossed it into Illustrator and then Photoshop using the Adobe Shape. I cleaned up the line work and got the image below:

From there I added the AIR logo in the "dust" and added a subtle gradient in the background of the filter so that the image would be more visible on a variety of different backgrounds, colors and times of the day. Below is the email from Snapchat after I submitted it and it was approved.

The filter was live during race day from 2pm-11pm while all of the action was happening. I used it several times and according to the statistics, it got a solid amount of usage that evening. It is surely a design I'm proud of, and it's always great to add something to the flat track community that I've grown up loving. The only thing I would do differently would be to include a larger location fence where the Snapchat filter could be used because I underestimated the size and dimensions of the racing pits, so most areas of the pits were out of reach for the filter. It did however cover the stands so fans could enjoy it. Below is one of several shots that I had taken with the filter, I personally think it looks pretty rad!