The Founders - Motion Graphics

The Founders is a feature documentary about the 13 women who founded the LPGA.

They were not supposed to be athletes. They were not supposed to get paid to play. They were not supposed to call the shots. But in 1950, 13 amateur women golfers battled society, finances and sometimes even each other to stake their claim to become professional sportswomen by creating the Ladies Professional Golf Association (The LPGA).

Long overdue, this film is about finally recognizing those unseen efforts and identifying The Founders as true icons of sport and equality. The film isn’t just for those who frequent the golf course. This film is for anyone who believes in the transformative power of defying the odds.

My role was motion graphic designer on the film, and I worked on various sequences for the film. Here is a showcase I put together of a couple of my favorite parts, and a bit of behind the scenes about them.

The lockers were the most interesting to make. The idea was to dig into the mind of each character in the film to create something that both felt like "them" and also communicated their character to the audience. Things like, everyone puts their name in their nameplate, but Babe doesn't, she just tapes it on top -- it just feels like something that Babe would do. Marlene has dresses cut out and pinned on to her figure, because that's just the type of lady she is.

I treated the locker section like a real shoot, and delivered various angles and shots to MightyFine so that they could have flexibility in the edit. Wide shots, closeups, push ins, dolly outs, etc.

These were a couple of unused mapping elements. These sections got cut/modified in the final film, but I liked the maps and concepts for them that I presented.

This is part of the final mapping sequence. It ended up being shorter, just highlighting the locations for the WPGA tournaments that happened before the LPGA came into existence.

The end credit scroll had a wood background like the lockers, as well as these behind the scenes polaroid pictures on a clothesline in 3D. Sort of an interesting element to scroll past.

Above each name plate on the lockers we added these "Founder Plaques". These were created 100% in Element3D, which allowed for fast rendering and flexible changes. I had a bit of issues with the quality and some jagged edges, but some of the newer features helped fix that.

The montage sections were originally built one at a time, but then MightyFine needed to build several more easily. What I ended up doing was creating a drag-and-drop project, for them to easily concept and create their own, and then once they figured out what they wanted in the final edit, I went back through and cleaned up and finished out the project. This was a way for them to iterate quickly to figure out what sections they were going to need, and what they needed in those sections, so that then they could pull the trigger on graphics budget.