Soccer/ Football project

A client approached me and asked for a full on package for some sporting events (intro, extro, lower 3rds, transitions, full page bg's). The tricky part here was that it was to be designed once, but with an eye to easy modifications in the future for different sporting events. This first one was to be for the upcoming world cup, but later it'll have to be re-tasked to use baseball, football, tennis, golf... whatever. And so I embarked on a design that would be easily updated at some future date.

First step: decide what the 'gak' was going to be. 'Gak' is what I call the little visual elements that inhabit my work. It could be boxes, video footage, light effects, grids, illustrator elements... and often all of these and more. The trick is to bring visual interest to the piece without looking too busy. It's the 'sugar' that visually ties the graphics in to the editorial of the piece and brings a sense of artistry (or lack thereof, depending on your point of view :) We settled on a 'stadium'. The budget didn't allow for a 'real' stadium to be constructed (virtually or otherwise), so I instead used 3dsMax to create an 'illustrative' stadium (also known as a 'metallic blob' or 'pile of goofy looking silvery stuff' or 'what Frank Gehry might do') Creative liberties were taken with the setup, but the idea was solid.

Next came the colours. Green and orange were used for this project, and I set things up on the After Effects side of things so that the scheme could be altered easily for the next iteration of the project (say, blue and green for baseball). Figure out how to bring all the elements on, give it all some dramatic camera movements and it's ready for some post processing in AE.

You can see a quicktime of the finished video here (no audio on this clip)

Then take a look at my long-winded ramblings (23 megs, 21 minutes) here as I walk through the various stages of the project.