Everything

Senior Managing Producer of the Creative Content Unit at ESPN, Aimee Stokes, trusted Motorwolf with developing the design and animation of a dynamic idea that the talented director, Rico Labbe, had envisioned for the 2021 NBA Draft show.

The idea consisted in creating a fast-paced world inside a microphone, where basketball athletes would play amid electronic components, lights and sparks. All edited against an original performance done by rapper, Benny The Butcher, the main talent featured in the piece.

After a few briefs discussing the visual needs, Motorwolf’s Creative Director, Miguel Oldenburg, began the research and design process. With a pragmatic approach, he pulled apart one of his own microphones to visualize the components, and the role they could play in the animation. This led to the first sets of drawings and sketches that later evolved to our “NBA Mic World”

“I realized there was a foam layer after the mic external grid, which could serve as a transition to enter our animated world. Then figured the mic diaphragm was the perfect element to create a stage for the performance of the basketball players and Benny The Butcher.”

“Since the microphone is such a dark environment, I decided to add red and blue neon lights to sustain the NBA brand colors, and add definition to the background. I wanted people to feel the “dome” created by the microphone mesh, I wanted to make clear we were inside a microphone.”

“I also transformed the thin rim microphones have in the widest part of their round windscreen, into a LED ticker where the words “NBA Draft” would animate around; and made use of the microphone handle to create the illusion of a neon lit tunnel, where Benny could appear walking and performing in a wider angle.”

Two sets of storyboards completed the design process, referencing the color palette for the animation environment, and showing the way certain elements would be used in the piece, like the sparks, and electric currents that carried the story.

We were invited to the set to take on the VFX supervision tasks. In order to have a more natural compositing of the green screen shots of the rapper, we requested a few sets of flickering color LED lights to be layered over Benny as he performed the song. This created a wonderful effect that truly embedded the talent in our CGI environment.

The shoot also included a separate set, where the scenes for the beginning of the piece were captured. These scenes happened around the iconic NBA Draft podium, where many legendary players were drafted and introduced to their professional basketball career.

Over these shots, the Motorwolf team was in charge of turning off the lights in the intro scene, and rotoscope iconic players from the past, as if they were holograms next to our podium. Also we needed to do some mic replacements, cleanups, add some neon ID’s, and tease the electric currents in several shots that would lead to our inner “NBA Mic World”.

The VFX post-production started with near a full minute of rotoscoping scenes, which needed to be done carefully, separating the alpha channels down to the detail of basketball nets in motion, intricate hair lines, transparency areas on the glass of the basketball backboards, and blurred action shots.

Then a full pass of cleanups and prep-work was done to the edit to have every scene ready to the final compositing, including the layers of the primary color grading and the removal of green screen noise on the keying subjects.

The team went to work modeling the microphone world and the electronic components. A set of neon lights were added to the scenes, and some fast camera moves. The result was a stunning, colorful, fun, and dynamic world. The composition was finished with overlays of sparks and electricity, which made the whole piece a visually exciting Open.

Thank you to Aimee, Olivia, Emmie, Justin, Tom, DJ, and everyone involved at ESPN for this opportunity, and thanks to Rico for masterfully directing such fun idea. Huge thanks to the team of talented animators and graphic producers working in the project… it was a total blast!

Here is the piece with the final “beauty” pass: