Playing the Field with 2D/3D Effects

After the edit had been finished on @radical.media’s 35mm footage for the Microsoft Windows XPA spot "Soccer," the goal was to tell the rest of the story with graphics. An on-screen narrator talks about using Windows technology to outwit younger, faster competition in soccer, as 2D and 3D graphics and animation spiral around him. When McCann-Erickson San Francisco asked New York and LA-based Stardust to handle motion graphics for the nine spots in the campaign, it was up to the company’s artists and animators to add the bells and whistles. "We went with a graphics-heavy approach, not only to reflect the overall campaign, but the more painterly and hand-drawn elements lent themselves well to the informality and competitiveness of the game," says Stardust’s art director and lead designer, PJ Richardson.

The live-action edits were pre-timed and approved by McCann and Microsoft, which meant the effects had to conform precisely to the edits. Several camera moves, including a long tracking shot in which the narrator appears several times with no apparent cuts, raised the stakes. Stardust created the effect with a 3D camera move using Maxon Cinema 4D. To ensure the seamless look, all elements were rendered in separate passes and composited in Adobe After Effects.

Working from detailed storyboards, Richardson and his team of 2D artists and animators next got down to creating the graphic environment to surround the live action. "The graphic chalk lines of plays and lines of the field that emerge around the narrator were done by compositing graphic lines from Adobe Illustrator in After Effects with warping filters to bend the lines to be more dimensional," says Richardson. "3D soccer balls were animated along a path with a repetition plug-in in Cinema 4D called MSA," he adds. The dimensional lines throughout were still graphic elements created in Illustrator and then given a 3D treatment in Alias Maya. "We mapped all the lines onto flat planes and animated them in Maya. Then we bent them along paths in Maya to get a sense of space and dimension," says Richardson.

One especially complex effect features an animated video camera grabbing a shot of a graphic soccer player — live-action stock footage from Ribbit Films — and producing multiple framed images of him. At the same time a 3D tracking move reveals strips of turf and a graphic soccer field. "The video camera was a model animated in Cinema 4D, and we applied a sketch and toon texture, which gave us the hand-drawn outline pattern to the edges. As the 3D move pulls back, we repeated thin strips of 3D-modeled grass along a variety of splines, again using the MSA plug-in in Cinema 4D," says Richardson.

Editing was completed at FilmCore in San Francisco by editor Doug Walker, and the spot was finished in Flame at Santa Monica-based Riot. Executive producer for Stardust was Eileen Doherty. "Soccer" was directed by Ralf Schmerberg and produced by Adam Gross.