Working alongside graphic designer and illustrator Dave Will (@DaveWi11) myself and the team at IMG created a full comic book and motion graphic sequence that told the story of the dramatic 2018/19 Champions League season
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Taking Dave's fantastic illustrations, I incorporated them into motion shots by animating the individual layers and assets that were supplied. These were then integrated into the full edit that our UEFA Digital department created following the 2019 Champions League final, and ahead of the launch of UEFA.tv
The visual style of this project was heavily influenced by the recently released Spiderman Into the Spiderverse. Telling the story of the dramatic season and the numerous iconic stories and moments, we decided that a comic book that illustrated these from MD1 right through to the final would be a great way to do so
Each of the pages created were used to transition from matchday to matchday, acting as in and out's in a chronological order to guide the viewer through the seasons action
To move from page-to-page, I set the comic book up as multiple pre-comps
in After Effects. I used the CC Page Turn effect I could flick between the pages as the piece moved from round to round.
Using a 3D Camera setup I was able to navigate the camera between panels to draw the viewers attention to particular sections, along with a heavy use of the camera lens blur parameters.
Animating individual elements such as text, shapes and textures was also a great away to breath another element of life into Dave's illustrations
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2018's 'Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse' used a variety of graphic styles and motifs that replicated illustrations from comic books to convey characters thoughts, actions and reactions- I did the same in graphics that we used to show moments throughout the course of the edit
The film enhances the comic book theme by making use of graphical elements like kinetic typography, texturized half-tone dots and speed-lines to draw viewers attention to particular sections of a shot. These reflect characters thoughts, reactions and actions to moments and act as visual aids to tell the viewer these
Replicating the style of the animation of 'Spiderverse' I created handrawn masks of the subjects on every two frames of the clips (which had the benefit of reducing motion blur). I converted the mask paths to a shape layer and then switched it to a stroke; then added a roughen edges effect for a loosely hand-drawn appearance
I had a set of glitch elements that I overlayed and blended in After Effects to create the various distortion effects - I duplicated the previously used mask paths for the rough strokes to a shape layer that I then used as a matte for the glitches
I incorporated a lot of graphic elements to action and celebration shots throughout. These were animated shapes, paths, bursts and explosions that reflected some of the visual motifs used in the film and and was another way of referencing the comic theme
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Dave's storyboards for pages dedicated to the 2018/19 Final + final design
It was brilliant to work on this project for the world's biggest club competition and bring Dave's illustrated comic book to life
