Westark Lions Baseball Open
Ladybacks Basketball was enough of a success to merit a handful of live Westark baseball games in the spring of 1996. It was also a foregone conclusion that I’d be doing a really cool open for it, and that it would blow the top off of the old basketball open. Given that the basketball open had won an Addy, this time there was quite a bit of pressure and scrutiny from inside the building. (By comparison, my work on the basketball animation the previous fall had been greeted with confusion - what exactly was I doing?) The baseball open timed out at nearly two minutes, but much of that total time included a huge audio pad/video background at the front for a pre-game warm-up (complete with clips of previous games - or so I intended), and a lengthy sponsor pad at the end. It never wound up running quite that way on the air. In the middle, however, was another chunk of fun animation: a baseball is hit out of the park, soars into the air past a floating logo. The camera angle swoops up over the logo, down through the letter O in “Sports,” zooms right down onto home plate, and makes a mad dash around the bases until the Westark Lions Baseball logo explodes out of the ground.
