East Rutherford, NJ SX

For starters, Supercross is awesome. I'm surprised it took me so long to get into it, but I'm grateful I got into it when I did. Daytona was my first sx event, and now Saturday I added East Rutherford, NJ to the list too. I think attending Red Bud had to have ignited the initial interest, and it's only grown from there.

It's funny how some of the best times are created from last minute planning. I had been wanting to go to the NJ sx since it's been on the schedule this year, but wasn't sure how it would play out logistically. One day a friend offered to buy the tickets if I drove. Less than ten minutes later tickets were purchased. Saturday came and we made a full day out of it, departing at 8:30am. 

One of the wisest things I did this past Saturday was taking my Polaroid camera to the race. I managed to capture some pretty awesome shots on film. Below are a few digital and print snapshots of the event. In case it's not apparent, I am also equally obsessed with panoramas as I am with Polaroids. Below are some shots from the event. 

Winter Grays

I've got to be honest, I find that winter can be a huge drag. Here in PA it's mostly gray dreary and gray and cold and gray. I enjoy that hermit lifestyle of minimal movement and socialization. However, this season I've put it a bit more effort to move and also attempt to appreciate the winter grays. Below are some unedited iPhone snapshots from when my friend and I wandered around Green Lane Park on a very foggy winter day.

ExtremeTerrain.com September Sale

Each month ExtremeTerrain.com (and AmericanMuscle.com) runs a monthly sale that requires fresh imagery and copy. For the month of September I found a killer in-house photo to use that shows multi-generational Jeeps in a fall landscape. This creative spans from email, on-site and social graphics with different graphics specs and orientations. Below is a social forum banner, an email b-spot, and an on-site banner. As you can see the layout of the copy varies per channel depending on which piece should be emphasized for each application.

AmericanMuscle Top Fall Mods

AM Top Fall Mods is not an overly large campaign to design for, but I spent a solid amount of time on the creative. We recently got a really awesome shot from our in-house photography and I wanted to use it for its seasonality. Below is the original shot.

I did some minor retouching by cleaning up the background and wanted to enhance the fog to make it seem like the temperature is beginning to cool off with the change in season. I retouched the car slightly and added some AmericanMuscle branding.

With this being the concept image, I sent it off to the various channels to get everyone on board with the imagery. It was a success and I proceeded to make the other generations. Since only one vehicle was shot in this scene, I resorted to using Keyshot to render out the other cars to place in this scene. In order to do that, I made a back plate image that would serve as the background image for each render I would make. My teammate composed an HDRI map from the location and matched the coloring to make the renders feel as real as possible. Below is the back plate image I created in Photoshop by removing the car from the scene.

I began with the 2015 model we have and worked on perfecting the orientation. I also made a paint color in Keyshot to be the Guard Green stock color which looks quite similar to the Bullitt Green of older Mustang generations. I did some work in post as well to get the black values to match the scene and created lighting in Photoshop as well. Through a few rounds of proofs and revisions, below are the final renders.

All are a similar green with the exception of the 10-14 which is a silver to go with the traditional stock paint colors. Overall I am very happy with how well these render/composites turned out. Once I got them all together I was able to make the various on-site, email and social graphics that were requested for this campaign. On-site we use live text which are restricted to web fonts, however with email and social I was able to be more creative with the typography and stylize the "Fall" messaging. Below is an email a-spot and b-spot with the stylized type in different arrangements.

Today the promotion has gone live on AmericanMuscle.com.

Moto GIF

I've found that taking burst photos on an iPhone is one of the best ways to get a killer action shot. I take them a lot at the race track, and the Baja Brawl was no exception. Below is an animated GIF of the #51 from 31 photos in a burst.

AmericanMuscle F-150 Top Summer Mods

Brand new AmericanMuscle F-150 Catalogs are being delivered today that showcase the F-150 and dirt bike creative on the cover for our Top Summer Mods campaign. About a month ago I showed an image from the photo shoot our in-house photographer and I worked on, and the creative is also live on the AmericanMuscle homepage. I'll backtrack a bit to walk you through how the image evolved from conception to completion of the entire campaign creative.

In our monthly meetings the creative team brainstorms creative concepts based on the marketing campaigns and copy the marketing team creates. I personally pull a lot of inspiring imagery from motorcycle related publications and websites, so incorporating a dirt bike with an F-150 was a natural idea. Being that this creative would be for the AmericanMuscle F-150 Top Summer Mods campaign, I found it fitting to create an image that showed the power of an F-150 and the lifestyle of someone heading to the racetrack in the summer time. 

The initial idea was approved so then I found a photo that had been taken before of a rolling F-150 with an angle that would show off the bike as well as the truck.

I knew the creative would be used for web graphics and a catalog cover so that affected composition decisions and I knew I needed a wide back plate to accommodate horizontal and vertical graphics. I roughly clipped out the rolling shot I found and used several stock images to use with the original 2015 rolling shot in order to compose a background for the truck. Below are the several stock images I used.

I found a low-res dirt bike image to use for the rough mock I had approved through the various departments. Once approved, I worked with the in-house photographer to get the composition as close to the mock as possible.

Our photographer shot the dirt bike in the 2015 and 2009 F-150 in the company parking lot, making sure to match the lighting in my original concept image. With the matching lighting, it made the entire photo composite go much more smoothly since lighting reflections and shadows would be more accurate to fit the scene. 

I clipped out each photographed truck with the bike in it and added it to the scene. For the 2015 I was able to use parts of the initial rolling shot I used as inspiration to get accurate motion blur on the vehicle and especially the wheels. I added a number plate to the bike as well as some AmericanMuscle branding to the graphics on the side of the bike. A few environmental elements such as photo filters, lens flares, reflections on the truck, and dirt kicking up was added to complete the Photoshop composite. Below is what each truck looked like in the scene when completed.

Because I needed to include a wide background scene to accommodate the variety of graphics this would be used for, a lot was clipped off in the actual graphics. Essentially, no graphic showed the entire background as shown above. Below is what the on site graphics look like currently at AmericanMuscle.com

This creative spanned across various web graphics, email newsletters and social images. The 2015 also was used as a cover on our AmericanMuscle F-150 catalog below:

I don't believe I could have been happier with how these graphics turned out throughout the entire campaign. It's always gratifying to develop an idea from conception to completion and have it turn out exactly how you imagined it. Not only did this creative reach the digital channels but it also made it to a printed form, which cannot be said for all of the campaigns we create. Be sure to check it out either when the catalog hits your mailbox or online.

Vector Transition

I've been working on a project that includes some vector work and I thought the transition from the photo to vector was visually interesting. See it below.

Early Photo Shoot

Today was the perfect day for a photo shoot. I am currently working on a project for summer that involves a dirt bike. This morning at 7:30 we had a photo shoot where I had my rough composite/sketch for inspiration & we went out to create the real deal. Stay tuned to see where the final creative ends up.

I thought it might make for an interesting post to break down one of my recent photo composites I have done. About four years ago when I began working at Turn5 I had zero compositing skills. Since then I have created quite a few composites using a variety of resources including photography, stock imagery, 3D renders and various Photoshop tools and techniques. I've posted the final versions of this specific AmericanMuscle F-150 campaign before, however, here's how it all came to life, more or less.

The top image was the initial rough concept to represent spring mods. This is a photo with a few Camera Raw adjustments that was taken by our in-house photography team. One of the first edits I made to this image in order to make it feel very seasonal, was to remove the one boat with the tarp. I also tidied up the environment to remove any distracting pieces.

Now that the majority of the environment was cleaned up and feeling seasonal, my next step was to focus on the F-150. Since AmericanMuscle is an aftermarket automotive business, it would make sense that the truck be a bit more modded than when it was photographed. Our vehicles tend to transform over time with mods and at times they appear less modded than others. When a vehicle appears to be less modded, it doesn't hurt to add a few in post that transform the entire look of the vehicle.

Above you can see the addition of the upper and lower grille on the 2015 F-150. Essentially, I could call this composite complete and begin placing it in the variety of web, email and display templates along with the campaign copy, however I decided to take it a step further below with some foreground elements.

One of the nicest additions one could make to a photo composite is foreground elements that fit within the depth of field with the photograph. I chose to add some greenery to the bottom left of this image that matched the out of focus boat. These blurred out blades of grass overlap the front tire of the F-150 to make the overall image more convincing (especially for when I show you the next F-150 year that was not shot in camera). I personally thought more green would only help the overall concept of spring for this campaign.

Finally, this 2015 image is ready to be placed in the variety of templates, however the project is not complete until the image is made generationally.  Currently AmericanMuscle sells products for 2015-2016 F-150s and also 2009-2014 F-150s.  Those products represent two very distinct body styles that we refer to as generations.  So in order to complete this project, I first began to remove the 2015 that was in camera to get a nice clean backplate.

Above is the cleaned up background. There are definitely some highly visible imperfections that reveal I used the clone/stamp tool to copy and paste elements from the image. With this I wasn't concerned with making it perfect since I knew the new F-150 would cover up those imperfections. The next task was to find a different in-house photograph of a 2011 F-150 at a similar angle that would fit my scene.

Not only is a close angle important when compositing, it is crucial to use images with similar lighting and environments. The 2011 F-150 above had similar elements and as you can see is also outside on gravel, surrounded by trees. After retouching the truck and clipping it out, it fit pretty nicely in the scene.

After retouching the truck and clipping it out, it fit pretty nicely in the scene above. I made sure to take the shadow from the original image and tweaked it slightly so it lined up well with the new 2011 F-150. 

Above shows the upper and lower grille mods that I also added to this truck to transform it and make it look more unique than other modded trucks we have shown in our previous campaigns.

Finally, I use the same layer that includes the foreground grass in this composite as I had in the 2015 version to make it a complete and finalized image to use for the spring campaign. Compared to where we started with the original 2015 photograph, I think both vehicles turned out well visually and fit the campaign direction nicely.