Aaron Chismar

Case file: Gemstone

Five names. Five real numbers. Each one verified.

A 2026 Lions season hype edit that opens with Suicide Squad inspired character reels: five animated title cards. Jared Goff, Jameson Williams, Amon-Ra St. Brown, Jahmyr Gibbs, Dan Campbell. Each with a nickname and one hero stat that counts up on screen during different sections of the video.

EXPRESSION-DRIVEN

Count-up digits
Every number ticks up live, driven by an expression in After Effects rather than animated by hand. One slider controls the value; the formatting handles the commas, so a five-digit total like Goff's 40,218 rolls up clean. Change the number, the animation rebuilds itself.
Verified statistics
Every stat is real and checked against primary sources. During production I caught and corrected numbers that were actually wrong. Nothing goes on screen unless it's true.
Two-app pipeline
Built across Premiere and After Effects on a live Dynamic Link. The cards, masked players, frame-by-frame photo collage, posterize, and Honolulu-blue gradient outlines, are built in Premiere; the animated text and count-up stats live in After Effects.
Campbell speech spine
Two Dan Campbell speeches, cut up and threaded across the buildup of the edit as its backbone, with invert-color captions and sound design synced hit-for-hit to the beat.

Press play for the full edit, sound on. Also on Instagram ↗

Case file: the Gibbs HUD

A HUD that doesn't just look real. It is real.

The HUD and the level-complete screen are designed to emulate Sonic the Hedgehog (1991) on the Sega Genesis, recreated faithfully, then wired to real data. Every number on screen is driven by an expression tied to the actual play, not typed in by hand.

ENGINEERED HUD

Yard counter
Tied to the real yards gained on the play and increments live as he breaks downfield.
Ring counter
Ticks up each time he runs through an animated ring, frame-matched to the footage.
Quarter clock
The actual in-game clock, counting down via a time expression. Not a static graphic.
Level-complete screen
Renders his real career totals in-world, styled like an end-of-stage stat card.

Loop pulled from the actual edit. Watch the full edit on Instagram ↗

About

I'm a sports video editor and content creator out of Detroit. I make the kind of edits I'd want to watch: cinematic, emotional, and engineered down to the frame.

What separates my work is my engineering mindset, which comes from my background in computer science. I'm finishing a B.S. in Computer & Information Science with an AI concentration, and it shows up directly in the edits: data-driven graphics, expression-built HUDs, and custom animation logic.

The creativity leads. The engineering makes it rare. That combination is what I want to bring to a team's media room, ideally one in Detroit.

Aaron Chismar at his desk, editing a Detroit Lions play in DaVinci Resolve

Toolkit

DaVinci ResolveFusion · Color · expressions

Premiere Proedit · Dynamic Link

After Effectsexpressions · motion

CapCutedits & effects

Motion graphicsVFX · compositing

Color gradingResolve Color page

ProgrammingPython · C++

EducationCS / AI · UM-Dearborn

Edits that move people, and a few that move the numbers too.

Gemstone — Lions Season Hype

Jahmyr Gibbs — "Sonic"

Detroit Pistons — Playoff Hype

Calvin Johnson → Amon-Ra St. Brown

Concert — Digicam Edit

Five names. Five real numbers. Each one verified.

A HUD that doesn't just look real. It is real.

Toolkit

Let's make something worth replaying.