Concept and Motion Design for a 30 sec spot promoting the FIS Alpine World Cup for Universal Sports Network. This was the first of a series of promos I created, all meant to have some similar elements throughout while still having unique looks of their own. The spot was broken up into a couple of different elements using simple shape and layer animations, a light trail effect on the skiiers and an electric write-on script font.
Frames from the final aired spot.
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INITIAL CONCEPTS
As with the others in the planned series, this was a pretty quick turnaround. Given only a couple days to sort out a 30 second promo, my internal goal was to keep it simple production wise to allow for changes to the edit throughout the process. The majority of the effects simply use adjustment layers, shape masks and animations. This would also end up helping since the "light trail" effect featured in this particular promo ended up taking the majority of the time to get working to a serviceable state.
The first round of boards went for a simple black and white treatment with the intent of focusing more on nice environment shots and footage of the athletes. This would have been heavily dependent on the quality of the footage and edit style to work well.
Subsequent rounds shifted to a color tint style for the billboard text moments and a bright contrasting "electric" glow for the font and light trails on the skiiers. I prefered either the bold look of the color tint or the elegant simplicity of the black and white, but these were ultimately merged together for the final spot.
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LIGHT TRAILS
This was to be the primary style of the spot and I initially wasnt entirely sure how to pull it off effectively in a timely manner using footage pulled from past broadcasts and a constantly evolving edit. My camera trackers were having some difficulty with the speed and amount of movment in the shots so i ended up having to "fake" it by hand using null objects animated in a 3D scene on top of the 2D footage.
Initial animation test for the light trail effect. Click to play .gif on mobile
Final frames
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BILLBOARDS
The billboard text moments were much easier in comparison to the light trails with most of the time spent on treating the footage featured behind.
Initial Concepts for billboard moments
Animation and Design process.
Full animation before color and footage. Click to play .gif on mobile
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END LOCKUP / LOGO
Much like the billoards this section uses simple animation techniques stacked to give texture and depth to the frame. Again, compared to figuring out the light trails this was relatively straightforward allowing me to take more time with some of the subtle details and animation. The supplemental endplates to display the broadcast times were repurposed from these elements.
