A Year in Sport with Strava
At Strava, at the end of each year, they reveal a “Year of Sport” montage for each user. A montage showing the year as one big activity - a celebration that visualizes every workout and achievement. But with every different user, there is a different identity, no two are the same - and neither should a montage be. In order to have each edit be truly unique, scenes would be built as a modular system so that any shuffle or order would be able to seamlessly flow into one another. Each piece of data would be reflected in its own scene, and to maintain a sense of flow we bookend each cut on the action of our protagonist. A base would then be created to act as the story structure for each user.
From a basic, to the most advanced athlete, there would always be “3 acts”
The remaining slots would then be filled in with the scenes that most uniquely reflect the individuals strongest data points:
Diving right into design explorations - it was clear that every scene needed to be powered by data, but also a need to create balance to humanize all the information. Here, it was decided to use a protagonist (a ball and trail reflecting the user) to guide us through and reveal the most important stats of your year. Knowing this, we began exploring a clean aesthetic - letting both character and data shine.
After nailing a solid balance between data and warmth - we still felt like some humanistic elements could be pushed through animation. With a tight timeline, we completed about 16 - 20 different scenes. Once delivering final animation to Stink Studios, they integrated everything with RITA, their real-time rendering platform. RITA was used to further personalize every montage by featuring elements such as usernames, photos, content from social networks, and of course unique data such as the length of your run. It’s always exciting to create something to be personalized.
