FOX Sports recently gave a team of 20 students from Savannah College of Art and Design’s Collaborative Learning Center (CLC) the opportunity to contribute animated opening concepts for the broadcaster’s Sports Super Bowl XLVIII game-day broadcast on Feb. 2.
Led by Austin Shaw, design industry veteran and SCAD professor of motion media design studies, the students spent 10-weeks during the Fall 2013 term working in MAXON’s CINEMA 4D to design creative elements for the opening of the Super Bowl based on assets provided by FOX Sports.
The school’s Collaborative Learning Center awards students credit and real-world project experience as they research and solve challenging design problems with the professional community. For the past 12 years, CINEMA 4D has been in use at SCAD in the motion media design department as a resource to teach state-of-the art 3D graphics and visual effects techniques.
According to Shaw, CINEMA 4D enabled his team to more easily and efficiently contribute high quality and inspiring content for consideration on the high profile project.
“CINEMA 4D was very useful to the design process and gave the students a winning advantage when creating the style frames and design boards that serve as important visual guides while also allowing us to showcase dynamic moments in time to FOX Sports prior to the production of the Super Bowl broadcast,” said Shaw.
Jason Diaz, who served as student technical director for the project, explained that during production CINEMA 4D’s character animation tools helped the team create a fast workflow for motion tests to animate Cleatus, the FOX Sports robot, and blend its different movements. “We were able to convert motion capture and hand animated data into motion clips using CINEMA 4D’s Motion System with a result that it felt more like editing footage, compared to copying and pasting keyframes in the traditional manner.”
The broadcast coverage of Super Bowl XLVIII is scheduled to air on FOX on Feb. 2, live from MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey. FOX Sports will also live stream the telecast at FOXSports.com/SuperBowl and on iPads through the FOX Sports GO IOS app.
