Nashville Predators – The awakening.
Magnetic Dreams recently completed the opening animated sequence for the Nashville Predators NHL team. A challenging but fun project to produce. Following the artistic direction of Joël Gibbs, the artists brought concept to completion. This animation plays on the JumboTron before every game.
A peek inside:
First we must give props to John Hussey and Greg Page at PK Pictures (www.pkpi.com) in Nashville and to Randy Campbell at the Nashville Predators for giving us so much creative freedom. They are so great to work with.
From concept to completion, this project took about 4 weeks. The main purpose was to get the crowd excited so it needed to be dynamic. Typically for this type of sports spot, our storyline is that the client’s mascot destroys the rival teams’. So we came up with a plot where the Nashville Predator hunted down the opposing players as they are trying to take over the city. We tried to give each enemy player specific characteristics to clearly distinguish them. Beyond the story, this project was interesting to us because we were allowed to explore a new artistic direction from years past (we’ve created a jumboTron animation for the Predators every year since 1998). The style we we were looking for was somewhere between Batman: The Animated Series and Team Fortress 2 . The style conforms to chiseled edges with sleek silhouettes. Even if a character was viewed completely back lit, we wanted them to be recognizable by their outline. The client didn’t want a dark Gotham look so we had to keep things colorful.
The predominant 3D package that Magnetic Dreams uses is Autodesk Softimage. For compositing we use Adobe After Affects.
The storyboard/animatic.
Our minion flock needed a leader. Who better to lead the pack than a man whose eyes glow like the flames of Hades? Our initial concept had glowing vapor emanating from the eyes....but we ran out of time... 
We wanted each character to be unique from their counterparts, so this character is tall and skinny. We styled his animation from Olympics speed skating footage and poses.
His design deviates from his colleagues, but his position enabled us to design a character that was a bit more unique, giving him an easily identifiable outline. We originally animated the Goalie like a tank. He moved forward without skating. We liked that approach since it made him seem less agile than the others and was funny. Ultimately the client wanted him to skate so we had to change his animation and remove the dust cloud emanating from behind him.
He's the small fast enemy. We wanted the Predator to use his enemy's speed to destroy him- in the spot, the Predator checks him into a building!
Side view conceptual design of the predator. The angles were very important to accentuate the features of the skeletal and muscular structure.
The 3D render of the predator. There is little deviation from the concept sketch. The sabers ended up looking rather goofy, so we scaled them down. The shader used for the Predator is a stretch from previous years. Historically, he always been straight up chrome with blue and orange decals. This year we tried to push him into a more stylized look, and made his decals a little more tribal looking.
A pass-by-pass composite of one of the shots. As you may notice, the last frame shows a particle dust cloud that was later scratched from the final delivery.
This is the original spot before the client made changes. The significant differences are the particles coming off of the goalie’s character.
Credits:
You can find out a little more about this crew back at the Magnetic Dreams website.
Concept / Storyboard:
- Rickey Boyd
- Joël Gibbs
- Chris Johnson
Modeling / Texturing / Lighting / Rendering:
- Jeff Greulich
- Chris Harkins
Rigging:
- Steve Alley
Animating:
- Andrew Atteberry
- James Coakley Jr.
- John Hamm
Particles / Special Effects:
- Joël Gibbs
- Don Culwell
Compositing:
- Joël Gibbs
- Judd Eschliman
- Rhea Borzak
IT:
- James Ramsden
Audio:
- Jon Hussey [ of PK Pictures ]
And, ultimately, the collective efforts of EVERYONE at Magnetic Dreams.
All of the above plus more Keep up the good work
Awesome job! I didn’t get a chance to see the full opening back when I was there in October.
So nice !
I like it so much co ’s it’s very dinamic and punchy.
The camera and compositing it’ great.
Good jod.