Admiral

"The Competition of Champions"

Final spot also on Admiral YT

The Brief

In 2021, the betting company Admiral approached us with one of their campaigns. The goal was to do a 20s motion design commercial, showcasing a universe and planets made of balls from different kinds of sports. The camera would be flying in between them, and you would see different kinds of sports you can bet on inside holographic interfaces. Cool.

The Process

The team was quite small, if I remember correctly, but the core was VFX Supervisor Mario Dubec, another motion designer Jan Kopecký, matte paint artist Martin Kostuň, and 3D artist Patrick Blades. I was responsible for figuring out the visual approach with the VFX Supervisor, gathering references, doing the previz, and then I also did the final comp. We did have a rough animation from the director/agency, which is always a huge plus to get going.

This was in the days I was using Cinema4D, and I used it here for the previz. Many iterations of it. Then I passed it to 3D and also to After Effects as a 3D camera and some locators in 3D space. Jan Kopecký was responsible for all the holographic interfaces.

The Earth Ball

The most complex camera move was definitely the first one: going from a stadium, to clouds above a city, then through clouds and into space, seeing the whole Earth. Anytime you are trying to be close to reality in scale and you’re dealing with something as huge as planet Earth, animation in 3D space becomes a huge pain. Just dealing with the zoom inside the curve editor is nonsense. Any attempt to smooth curves of the camera path means you can end up completely elsewhere a couple of frames later, etc.

I used google earth for the animatic - got couple of tiles through Blender addon. Now that I was looking at the original tutorial, I found this one from 2023, which looks easier to use.

Previz development stage

So the shot is split into two shots — hiding the transition in the clouds — which is very natural and a cheat used very often — but hey, gets the job done. We also went through a couple of iterations with the Earth ball design and other planets as well.

The Conclusion

Biggest takeaway for me was the path animation of the camera going from the Earth into space for sure. And then putting it all together in comp and having all the context from the initial brief was a nice experience — because of the small size of the project, this was quite manageable. And don't bet, kids! 🙂

Thanks for checking out the project!