Kolkata based Sagnik Sengupta, a designer and music lover, narrates how he executed an exciting yet challenging idea for a football promo, and the tools it took him to transmit it onto the screen.

References keep you on track

The brief was to show the essence of football and to justify what really makes football fans believe so much in the game. A reference by the promo team showed a man forming while running with the ball. I wanted to take that idea further and add more edge to it. So I decided to experiment with Motion Capture.

Carry your concept all the way

The concept was to show the players in an alternate world, each representing some of the teams taking part in the Champions League, and performing specific moves that bring dynamism and intensity to the game. I chose to lay the focus on the players and their actions, then on the environment. With the entire sequence mapped mentally, I found the specific actions in MoCap and tweaked them. I used an X-Particles, a third party particle simulation plugin, for the ball to have some kind of a particle-trail to it.

A good designer is in sync with one’s tools

It was easy to play with MoCap data in Cinema 4D, with its inbuilt Mograph module. The Mass and the ‘Force’ tab of the dynamic tag really helped. Same goes for the ribbon. A lot of tweaking was involved. The ‘Shader Effector’ came in really handy in specifying colours to the particles, and giving them the jersey look of each team. For lighting, I used GreyscaleGorilla’s Lighting Kit and HRDI Studio Pack to achieve the overall goal!