Madness at Midnight

Daredevils and superheroes joined forces to launch the University of Maryland's Midnight Madness October 2003 at the Comcast Center.

Home of the University of Maryland Terrapins Basketball Team, the Comcast Center rocked to the brainchild of Image Engineering's creative department. Image Engineering® has been doing this event for the last four years. "We're all alumnus and wanted to rock our 'home town' so to speak." Jack Roemer and Andrew Suehle pitched concepts of daring heroes and a team poised to take on all challengers. Amy Case honed the heroes' edge, and completed the script treatment. In super-team effort, Jack and Amy prepared the show elements.

Last year's show highlighted the grand opening of the Comcast Center by utilizing its new large LED screens to project a custom video. The show expanded from laser graphics on the court to a completely integrated laser and video experience. Chief Artist, Jack Roemer, summed up the challenge, "This year we knew we had to top last year's event, which the crowd loved." Andrew Suehle pitched FineLite image projection to the client." I felt the Finelite would add a new dynamic to the show, which complement the laser graphics." The client supplied photos of the players to Amy who converted them to scrolls for the Finelites.

"In the beginning it was supposed to be a fairy-tale theme, but that didn't have enough punch to it." Says creative designer, Amy Case. "The music was actually chosen first, without knowing it. I must have been humming it around the office after watching the Daredevil DVD with my girls. It just seemed right. From that point on, I began imagining these flying turtles and lots of 'bams' and 'pows' all over the place." Jack Roemer mixed the Daredevil main theme and Drowning Pool/Rob Zombie's "The Man without Fear" using ProTools. He added special voice-overs in the Rob Zombie piece to replace "Daredevil" with "Terrapins". Using bold choices for the audio fit the demographics of the audience.

Amy chose artistic reference from a Batman graphic novel. "I wanted authentic 'comic book' feel for the imagery in the video so I spent hours of research chosing the 'right' graphic novel for reference." From this, Jack made sketches to create the look for the video. He took the reference images to the next level. "Amy's notes were drawn up as frame sketches first, then the ones that we liked were redrawn, cleaned up and inked." (ie. a storyboard was created) Jack scanned the images into Photoshop. He added color layers over the scanned images. Once the images were digitally converted, AfterEffects took over the video generation. He layered titling and sound with the AfterEffects generated image movement to finish the video. "We were in the middle of four other shows and only had three days to finish the video production."

(Image to the left) progression of frame generation for the video segment. After sketching the layouts the images were redrawn and inked then imported into Photoshop and colorized.

While Jack completed the video work, Amy finished the FineLite slides and began creating the laser graphics for the second half of the production. "I took some of the images from Jack's drawings for the show. We decided to use stills and text for the laser portion and add movement using Pangolin." Image Engineering's custom font library generated the 'creepy' text for the content. Headlines and scores from last season spanned the court in simple text. "I didn't use the stock Pangolin fonts. I never like to look like everyone else out there, so I generated a font of my own to use for the headlines. It's those little extras that can make a difference." She converted a basic san-serif font to laser output by hand drawing the letters and digitizing them individually. Amy picked other elements from Image Engineering's laser library to fine-tune the show. Jack described the laser show as a 'laser pep rally.'

"There was a lot that went on from concept to completion. The script treatment and preliminary legwork set the tone for a very professional and smooth performance. From excel spreadsheet timelines to full storyboards, the show encompassed a level of development rarely seen in the laser industry," said Amy.

The Terrapin fans rewarded the creative team's efforts. The night of the show, the sold -out crowd cheered when their mascot became larger than life in the video and on the court. Laser projectionists manned two systems, one in the catwalks with the white light laser and a 20 Watt Yag laser at the entrance of the court triggering beam cues from a 16 channel NSI board. Low fog filled the vomitories as eight High End Systems Studio Spot 250s bally-hoo'd the court during player introductions. Using a Hog 500 lighting console, Image Engineering manually triggered the FineLite cues.

Every element of the production was done in house from low fog to the studio spots Image Engineering had the equipment to handle the entire event.

Production artist Amy joined the crew above the court. "It was the best crowd response I've heard. The fans at the Comcast Center are incredible. It rocked!"