Even sports teams playing at the highest level possible have to find new ways to connect with fans.

About two years ago, the marketing department behind the women’s and men’s United States national soccer teams “made the decision to focus on the players and tell their stories,” said Neil Buethe, director of communications for the U.S. Soccer Federation. “That storytelling element can really capture an audience and bring interest in the overall team and their journey to the World Cup or a big event like the Olympics.”

And so, with the 2016 Summer Olympics upon us, U.S. Soccer has taken this storytelling initiative to a new level, teaming with Calabash Animation on a series of 18 branded content shorts for the women’s team, sponsored by Ritz, and built around personal anecdotes from each member of the current roster headed to Rio for the big games.

“We realized all the players have these great stories that they’re always telling, whether it’s stories about something from the past or something with the team that’s connected to soccer,” Buethe said. “We would hear these as staff members who travel with the team. No one really hears those stories besides us but they’re really unique, fun and engaging.”

To get these tales across, U.S. Soccer and Calabash have supplemented live-action narrating from the players themselves with delightful animation, resulting in a highly effective blend of kid-friendly cartoony fun with an inclusive, more sophisticated vibe created by its athlete raconteurs. It’s “a really fun way to engage fans of all ages,” Buethe said: “Younger girls who are obviously a big part of our fan base for the Women’s National Team, but also adults and moms and dads that are bringing their kids would find these interesting.”

Sebastian Podesta, lead editor and cinematographer for the U.S. Soccer Federation, directed the spots, working closely with the players to hone in on their most meaningful stories about the game. Some of the anecdotes are embarrassing, others funny, poignant or inspiring. Once the stories were determined, Podesta’s team then went about capturing the telling of them on camera. “We would have them tell it once and then we’d keep asking questions and building upon it,” he said. “The players are already amazing women with great personalities so we just encouraged them to get into the details of it so we could have plenty to work with in post and really form the stories.”

When the edited live-action stories reached Calabash for animating, the studio’s creative director Wayne Brejcha was impressed by how gripping they were. “Podesta’s team did a fantastic job with all the players,” he said, “really eliciting these wonderful moments and putting the stories together in a really coherent way… One of the really remarkable things about all the stories is, you get through them and you’d swear you just spent 10 minutes [with the player], but they’re very short. [They] did really economical editing with them.”

With the stories taped and edited, “step No.1,” in animating them, Buethe said, was to “create an image” of each player and “make sure the players were comfortable with that animation of themselves.” Developed by Calabash staffer Jeff Mika and contracted artist Joe Merideth, this initial batch of caricatures would also wind up providing “a nugget of a core look,” Brejcha added, that would provide a visual undercurrent to all 18 spots and prevent them from becoming too disparate.

“It was a lot of fun developing the caricatures of the players,” said Sean Henry, executive producer for Calabash. “We knew we would have to be a little bit sensitive in that we didn’t want too make them look goofy or silly. But they’re just really down-to-earth people for the most part, really warm and didn’t seem to take themselves too seriously. They were able to poke a little fun at themselves.”

Complicating the process of creating the likenesses, Brejcha said, was that “so many of the players told stories of themselves as little kids, little four- or five-years-olds just getting into the game.” For these child-sized portraits, “we had no idea what they looked like,” Henry added. To help Calabash hone in the athletes as kids, Podesta worked closely with the players to track down family photos and even personal items such as one player’s childhood retainer case. “In the end it’s funny how accurate some things were,” Podesta said. “I remember Ali Krieger saying how the rock collection box [depicted in her animation] was the exact same. It felt good to nail some of those details.”

With the caricatures in place, Calabash and a large team of freelancers could begin fully realizing each of the 18 shorts, which ended up being something of a master class in pipeline management. “Two-three minutes of animation per video—that’s about an hour’s worth of material produced in just a couple months, which for animation is quite a lot,” Henry said. “A lot of videos going on at once in a very short period of time required a very different kind of workflow for our team. We did have a core group of directors and animators working in-house, but we also had a large group of animators working out-of-house… We had to build up a management structure in order to handle all that.”

Though each individual artist worked within their preferred animation program – ranging from Toon Boom to After Effects – the assets were rendered before delivery and instilled with alpha channels before being sent to the central hub at Calabash, where the videos were finalized with green-screen technology so that the live action footage could be laid in. “It was all software-agnostic at that point,” Henry said. “That allowed us to work with a bigger group of freelancers that we might have normally been able to. If we had had to do the whole thing in-house we wouldn’t have had time to train that many people on the software that we use.”

Aside from spreading the workload out to increase efficiency, Calabash settled on a “hybrid puppeted and drawn animation” approach for each piece, an “economical style of working that wasn’t so limited that it was hard to watch,” Henry said. “There’s still quite a bit of motion and visual interest and complexity but at the same time it’s a fairly simple style. We didn’t want to upstage the live action and the athletes.”

Working quickly actually benefitted the spots, Henry continued, because “for whimsical storytelling like this, it was very appropriate that it not be overdone, that it have a breeziness to it and a looseness.” That way, Calabash could animate tales ranging from Hope Solo’s grisly tale of injuring her arm to Tobin Heath’s lighthearted tale of working with a soccer field maintenance team, and it would all feel part of a cohesive whole.

“They were all remarkable and I could go into great length about every one,” Brejcha said. “We just lived these stories so intensely while producing them, and they were all marvelous and all loveable in their own way.”

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