2K Sports NBA2K
For NBA 2k15, I led a team of 7 artists at Hectic Digital to create custom animations for all 30 NBA teams. These animations would play inside of NBA 2k15, when a user chose a certain team to play a match.
I had regular meetings at Visual Concepts / 2k Sports to both win the initial work, and to craft our collaborative game plan.
Creative Animation
We really brought the NBA logos to life! If the logo had facial features, then we created controls to add character to it. If the logo was more inanimate we found a way to add life to it.
180 Outputs!
We did animations for all 30 NBA teams, yes..but there were multiple aspect ratios and special short versions that we created. All in all, 180 outputted movie files. Wow.
A great collaboration
We worked tightly with Visual Concepts, and the revs went along efficiently. It was such a success, we helped with NBA2k16 too. Future releases of NBA2k were handled internally by Visual concepts.
Client side
Art Director – Herman Fok
Producer – Matt Crysdale
Hectic Digtial team
Creative Director - Geoff Hecht
Vfx Supervisor - Clayton Douglas
Technical Lead - Benjamin Kluewer
Lead Animator - Albert Carmona
Animator - Guillem Ruiz
Animator - Paul Fuller
Lighter - Sam Hedberg
Compositor - Sara Elenen
There were so many different portions of this project that were rewarding. While making the logos "move" was my personal favorite part of the experience, the conversion of the logos from flat art to 3D was also very satisfying.
While we needed to make slight adjustments for the logos to work within context, you can see from the side by side comparisons that we tried to maintain the integrity of the 2D team logos as much as possible.
Looking back at this project I have such fond memories. I challenged our team to push the animations to the max!
And while the lighting and shading under today's lens looks like it could be better, I think it really shows up still in the animation how creative they were.
