In early 2017 Loteri Cymru launched a brand new weekly society lottery for Wales, designed to raise money for good causes across the country. When they called on Bomper to create the weekly, televised live draw animation we leapt at the chance. The project saw us working alongside fellow Welsh outfits Kinetic Pixel, Slam Media and Golley Slater to produce an innovative and eye-catching two-minute draw show for S4C.
The show has two main purposes: to illustrate the drawing of the winning numbers and to highlight previous winners and beneficiaries across Wales. To this end we developed a concept that would link up these two goals with one through line, transforming Wales into a miniature, working ball machine.
It was important that the design felt of a piece with the campaign developed by Cardiff's Golley Slater, and so our Wales-as-ball-machine concept was developed to act as a friendly and light-hearted invitation to the whole country to play. We developed a visual identity for the show from the ground up, invoking key colours and motifs from the live-action advertising to tie all the separate arms of the project together.
The project saw us working hand in hand with Kinetic Pixel's team of real time graphics specialists, marrying our pre-rendered graphics with their real-time draw and map sequences. We supplied back plates and full working 3D files to KPX, who built an innovative system that would allow them to reflect changing information on the fly.
The show's detailed map sections, for instance, used our 3D mesh of Wales, aligned with real world geography data that allows KPX to pinpoint different areas each week. Here KPX styled and treated this sequence to match our pre-renders as closely as possible.
The draw section of the show saw us take a different approach, building a pre-rendered animation into which Kinetic Pixel could insert new lotto balls every week in real-time to reflect that week's numbers, without the need for rendering. We supplied backplates, lighting and style reference and animated meshes to ensure that all elements sat within the scene seamlessly. The random draw takes place minutes prior to the show airing each week -- and so on the fly rendering and quick integration was key.
