About this work
This 2D animated video was for the EFL (English Football League) to kick-off their discrimination awareness month.
The goal was to highlight the issue of discrimination at football matches and online, as well as inform fans how they can report any incidents they experience.
Style Frames
Here are some style frames and behind the scenes shots from the project.
More about this project
This animation required a whole stadium of animated people. And to highlight the negative effect of discrimination. Due to the sensitive nature of the subject matter, the crowd needed to be represented abstractly to avoid singling out characteristics.
I used Cavalry to generate the crowd and then comped them in After Effects. The process went something like this:
- I start with an incredibly simple representation of a single fan.
- Duplicate it into a grid format and set the height and width.
- Then I use an array with various shades of blue to randomise the colour.
- I add a slight random offset to the X position, to make it feel a bit more organic.
- Then I add an Oscillator to the Y position to make the crowd jump up and down.
- Then I randomly stagger this oscillator, so everyone is jumping independently.
- And I also randomise the time scale of each jump – to make it feel a bit more organic.
- I have some pre-made speech bubbles with (what I learned are called) ‘grawlixes’ or ‘obscenicons’, and I want a red/negative effect to emanate out from the swearer.
- I use a colour blend to turn the crowd red, and use several circular falloffs to transition from red to blue.
- Lastly, I just need to cut off some of the edges to make the crowd fit my stadium graphic.
- The result is a large stadium full of people all jumping up and down, that would have been near impossible to animate manually.
I also used Cavalry to generate the text boxes with the Grawlixes (Swear symbols). This allowed me to dynamically change the length and content of them with ease.
