NBC SPORTS // SUNDAY NIGHT FOOTBALL OPEN // THE MILL

// CONCEPTING // DESIGN // DIRECTION // 3D // ANIMATION // VFX

// DESCRIPTION

Got to work on this action packed open for NBC Sports Sunday Night Football sponsored by Pepsi and featuring Carrie Underwood and a slew of this year's MVPs. Really enjoyed helping to bring this spot to life working with a huge team of talented artists from all walks of life at The Mill New York. This project was well underway by the time I got involved but the player echoes sprinkled throughout were still to be designed and animated. I got to jump in and explore some possibilities with lighting and layout to bring the punch to these echo sequences that the client and audineces were looking for. My layouts were then brought into a Flame setup and masterfully animated.

I was also able to jump into the animated LED setup behind Carrie Underwood. In the shoot there was only 5 blue screens behind her on a bare set. All the lighting and animation was added in comp. My focus was adjusting the animated setup of the players and words "GAME ON" on the screens behind Carrie. I had to pay special attention to get the lights to bounce off highlights on the players helmets and sometime add things in by hand to make their silhouettes stand out more clearly. It was a real challenge given that the shots were quick and the camera was always sweeping by.

// PROCESS

Player Echos

There were 12 rockstar players we wanted to feature throughout the spot and footage that was shot of them doing several aggressive movements shot at a extremely high framerate given us a lot of room to experiment. Playing off the the fluorescent floor lamp lights in the set background we tried a few possiblities and settled on a forest of vertical lights the players would be jumping through. This allowed us to create interesting parallex by placing some lgihts in the front near camera and others far off in the distance. We had full control of the lights as we were working in a 3D space in flame that I laid out first in Cinema 4D. The next challenge was makign them all feel slightly unique. We had a few slow mo sequences to play with and worked hard to get the most dynamic move out of each set.

// PROCESS

Player Echoes Look Dev 001

Frames of initial experiments with the flourescent lamps where I played with suspending them in the air in unique patterns.

// PROCESS

Player Echoes Look Dev 002

We settled on vertical floor lamps. The next step was fleshing out how each player would echo based on available footage. We also started establishing color schemes for each light setup.

// PROCESS

LED Screen Animations

The LED screens behind Carrie needed constant movement and detail. Footage of players from a large library of shots were placed and retimed. Each screen was sorted out indiviually and then placed side by side in the shot to make sure they all synced and played nicely together. Several effects and a gird pattern that mimicked tiny LED strips and was applied to that footage and the result was as you see below.