Sports Fuel
Fuelling the world’s greatest athletes is big business. When Gatorade looked to shift their brand into a data-driven space within sporting nutrition, they looked to Framestore to tell their story. The 3D team in LA looked to interpret the brand’s ambitions with a cool new graphic design. Executive Creative Director Aron Hjartarson spent several weeks masterminding potential techniques before settling on the idea of intricate webs of data points, animated to echo the movements of iconic sports stars.
Custom rigs and hardware were built to capture the vast amount of data needed to recreate multidimensional athletic performances. 3D artists then removed and rebuilt the athletes’ bodies in the scenes, filling the space instead with the dynamic graphic designs.
The locations too called for some CG trickery, with set extensions used to replicate the grandeur and scale of Olympic-worthy stadiums and courts. Technically speaking, the team used both Houdini and Maya for their 3D word, finding ever more sophisticated ways to bridge the two: ‘We were able to successfully and efficiently transfer over complex 3D data between the two packages, which allowed the artists to work seamlessly each day’, notes CG Supervisor Richard Shallcross.
Beau Leon added the grade, treading carefully to perfectly preserve the impact and detail of the 3D work - ‘an interesting challenge’, he notes, but one that came together beautifully in the master film.