Sports Segment Template

Motion Design

Overview

Process

Design

Conclusion

Sports templates that cover every major sports league and team. Each After Effect project controls team and team colors and has an option for a custom team. This custom option was used for new teams, college teams, and highschool teams that news stations covered. All leagues that were covered are NFL, NHL, MLB, NBA, WNBA, MLS, NWSL, Golf, Tennis, and Car Racing. each one is easily customizable allowing the user to create an open, transition, and lower third in minutes.

I came to my manager asking if there was a plan to update the sports templates as they were approaching 7 years old. Showing this initiative I was tasked with updating and templating them as well as creating new opens, transitions, and Lower thirds for sports we air but don’t cover often.

I had a total of a month to complete this project updating all the templates, getting them coded and delivered to all stations across the TEGNA umbrella. With the short time frame I had to ideate on the fly taking in inspiration from places like Nike, ESPN, Sports Center, Fox, and other sources of sports and Esports. I started designing immediately our big 4 baseball, football, hockey, and basketball. I wanted each of them to have some commonality while also being exclusive to that sport. I also needed to create them so that they would be used for multiple years without needing to change athletes.

For the design of them I went with logos of teams that would be around the screen to show which open is for who and then utilized rotoscoping to take athletes that would belong to each sport pushing more emphasis on people just tuning in.

After 2 weeks we did a first round of checks that led to the finalization of the templates. I cleaned them up, made them more concise and added in some gradients and drop shadows to give depth. I then had to code each piece so that anyone could jump into the project and render out their teams open, transition, and lower third. To speed up this process I frankensteined old expressions from previous projects and used some amount of AI to clean it all up making sure that the code would work. I then debugged and processed it myself to make it more cohesive. I then implemented the expressions throughout all the projects so that everything would change when the teams were changed. This allowed producers, editors, and other designers to churn out graphics within minutes for respective teams, areas, and stations.