Alaska Aces Open

The Alaska Aces were a minor league hockey team in Anchorage Alaska and came to us looking for a new open for their games. We came up with this idea to shoot the team in the arena with really dramatic lighting and powerful scenes to exhibit the toughness of the players and hopefully pump up the crowd in return.

Unfortunately, the best laid plans don’t always work out the way we were hoping. It was already a tight deadline going into the final week without anything actually shot due to scheduling conflicts with the team, but it was made worse when they dropped out altogether. So, thinking on our feet, we decided to use two news photographers from the station, some of the Aces’ uniforms, a green screen and After Effects to compliment game footage of the team in an effort to achieve the same effect.

It was chaos. I had never really delved into After Effects before, so taking lead on this project was very troubling to me, but I knew it would be amazing if I could pull it off. So, we shot the two men in our green screen studio and I went off to work. It was a long week and I learned a lot about what not to do in such an intensive composite, but it worked out. The team really liked it and they would use the open until the franchise went under several years later.

This was my first real composite project and it taught me a lot about what I love to do. The scenes with the two players in the darkened arena are completely computer generated. The only real assets in the images are the people themselves.