I was approached by the Tennis Channel for graphical assistance. Each week, their team would painstakingly populate and animate a graphic leaderboard reflecting that week's matches. I was contracted to speed things up for them, so I engineered a graphics toolkit and a series of scripts that would auto-populate the leaderboard based on a spreadsheet, automatically animate the re-shuffled ranks, and then set up all of the render passes in the render queue. My toolkit and scripts dropped the time to make the graphics from 8 hours to 30 minutes.
Here's the completed graphic:
I started the project by creating an Adobe ExtendScript animation script in VS Code that would automatically move ranking bars based on spreadsheet input.
Once the basic movement was established, I built a script to populate the AE project with spreadsheet information from this CSV template, automatically finding headshots, inserting names, and applying country flags based on the user's spreadsheet input:
I then wrote the fully-fledged animation script that would move everything correctly, flip ranks, and count up scores. Here's a late test during that process:
And here's the code I wrote that makes the whole thing work:
I completed a similar project for the Tennis Channel to pull match information from non-standardized spreadsheets, grab the correct information with regular expressions, drop it all into a CSV file, and populate headshots, names, and flags based on that CSV file. The results looked like this:
The Tennis Channel has been an amazing client, and having the opportunity to create scripts for them has really filled out my knowledge of how to control After Effects under the hood!