One Post create new CGI Christmas idents for Sky Sports

One Post and Sky’s internal creative department are currently completing work on a series of CGI Christmas idents for Sky Sports, featuring sporting snowmen displaying their athletic prowess on the football, rugby and cricket pitches.
“On a creative level, one of the key aims was to ensure that the snowmen looked like serious players, reflecting the high quality of sporting events and sportsmen shown on Sky,” said Grahame Curtis, who directed the sequences at One. “Bearing this in mind, when animating the sequences, it was important to pay special attention to the way the snowmen moved as that they needed to possess a fair degree of attitude and look like they took their sports seriously.
“Another focus area was to develop the sporting characters as much as possible, bringing them to life and making each one appear unique. For example, the rugby snowmen were given larger branch arms and gnarlier carrot noses in comparison to the cricket snowmen, who were dressed in gloves, hats and scarves, giving them a shabby chic style.
“One of our animators, Saul Freed, has done some clever stuff with locators, distance tools and influence objects, which he calls ‘squashy IK’, which has taken care of a lot of the secondary animation aspects and freed him up to do more of the primary animation. Also, through the use of Maya's Soft body dynamics we have been able to automate the process of the snowmen leaving a trail in the snow - something that could have been a bit of a headache otherwise.”
In addition to designing and animating the snowmen characters, One’s Head of CGI Will Byles created an initial 12 second generic opening sequence to precede all the idents. This is a 'fly in' over clouds, swooping down through the clouds and into a winter snow scene of a village/small town with the relevant sports pitch, created using Maya’s Fluid dynamics and particle systems. For each sport a separate pass has been created ending with different variations of the playing surface - stumps for cricket, goalposts for rugby and nets for football.
(GB)