EURO 2024
“WHERE HISTORY IS MADE”
A hype animation we created with the folks @ Bleacher Report to celebrate the launch of the Euro 2024 tournament.
Inspired by 'Night at the Museum' a mysterious glow pulses through the museum causing footballing stars to come alive and hunt down the source!
KICK OFF
With 7 weeks to go before the start of the Euro 2024 campaign, Bleacher Report approached us with an idea for a hype campaign. “7 weeks??” we asked. “Yes” they said. “How many characters??”. “8”. “We’re in”.
So we kicked off a rapid turnaround project from script to picture, which launched on the day of the tournament.
Working with the guys at Bleacher, we refined an ambitious script into something achievable in our timeframe, while keeping the spirit of the “Night at the Museum” reference alive and kicking.
TACTICS
With this fast turnaround, we had to use every trick in the Ritzy playbook to get a cast of characters realised.
Our new improved in-house pipeline tools made complex and laborious tasks much quicker.
We were able to reuse geometry, creating variation with the rig and blendshapes.
STARTING LINE UP
Featuring the stars of the tournament, we developed 8 characters and international kits.
A custom stone shader was created that we could apply across all materials and easily adjust.
And by having consistent naming conventions, we were able to repurpose 1 character into 8 variations in seconds.
One of the requirements in the brief was to cater for a last minute injury to a player - with our reuseable rig and shading method, we’d have been able to swap out a character last minute, should Harry Kane have broken his second metatarsal.
GOOD SKILLS
Our animators had the uneviable task of getting through a minute’s worth of animation in a few weeks, often with shots featuring multiple characters.
Most of the work was hand keyed, but for a few idle loops and walk cycles, one of our animators, Mason Haynes, used motion capture to create a quick foundation of animation to work on top of.
Our rigs had the versatility that these animations could be quickly applied to any character.
The technique was used for a few different elements in the film, including the horse’s head animation - a quick wiggle of the Vive controller and it was done!
CREDITS
Director: Dan Edgley
Exec Producer: Charlie Batho
Producer: Anika Zinat, Beth Yirtaw
Storyboards: Marta Calvo
Motion Graphics: Maya Remenyi
Modelling & Surfacing: Rory Cooke, Hen Levene, Amina Muench
Rigging: Vytas Puisys
Animation: Vytas Puisys, Mason Haynes, Manuel Gomez
Lighting/Comp: Adria Carballada, Charlie Batho
FX: Rory Cooke