Sunday Night Football 2015

Sunday Night Football has been the number show in Primetime for seven consecutive years and it has been a privilege to be part of the creative team for such an important NBC property.

As a season ticket holder, receiving your annual ticket package is akin to Christmas in July. For Sunday Night Football, we wanted to create that same excitement for each and every SNF matchup throughout the season. Sunday Night Football is guaranteed the best weekly matchup and what better way to sell the season than by promoting it as the ultimate season ticket package. The best games and the best players on the best network.

This graphic approach bridged two seasons, starting in 2014. It was also significant in that motion graphics team pitched our concept against multiple outside creative agencies and we won the work. The marketing and production executives were so pleased with 2014’s package, that we were asked to provide a version 2.0 for 2015.

Production value is a phrase you hear often around SNF, and with that, the promotional graphics had to look rich, expensive, and high-end. As the ultimate season ticket package, we looked at traditional printing techniques that cost lots of money—spot varnish, metallic foils, and embossing—and recreated those techniques digitally.

TYPEFACES

Tungsten, supported by Forza, were our two go-tos. We chose Tungsten for its strong and assertive voice. As a condensed face, it worked well and looked just as good whether typesetting short or long lines of type. So, Tampa Bay Buccaneers typeset just as well as Tom Brady or Ben Roethlisberger.

Forza was our secondary typeface and was used for subheads, authentic ticket typographic details, and other typographic textures.

Color

Dark navy and metallic gold did well to provide a rich luster while working well the various team colors they would ultimately be paired with. Navy also did well to provide enough illumination to show off the paper textures, spot varnishing, and embossing we created in 3D. We wanted to go with black, but it didn’t offer the dynamic range we needed before it went dull and gray.

mOTION

We relied on Cinema 4D’s dynamic engine to create realistic and responsive motion to falling tickets and tickets interacting with one another on a flat surface. We went through many motion tests from 2D tracking falling tickets, to traditional keyframing, to dynamic solves. The dynamic solves ended up working well with our 3D workflow while providing the realism we were aiming for.