Premier League English football (read: soccer) is a gritty, exhilarating sport with some of the world’s most devoted fans. Some of them even live in the US, though in general, Americans don’t follow the League, if they are aware of its existence at all.

Understanding the very high value of the Premier League as potential entertainment, NBCUniversal has sought to change that, with a $250 million investment that finds every game of the current season airing across NBC Sports’ network of channels and online. To bring Americans up to speed, NBC Sports has also unleashed a massive ad campaign involving everything from viral spots featuring the very American Jason Sudeikis as the woefully ill-equipped new manager of Tottenham Hotspur, to New York bus stop ads that assign a Premier League team to each of the city’s boroughs.

The campaign’s pièce de résistance, however, might very well be the quietly awesome Premier League Team Picker, an interactive digital feature that lets NBCSports.com visitors click through a series of questions to help them determine what team they are most suited for. The queries are mostly pure silliness – a person who claims they like concerts, for instance, gets paired with Tottenham because “many musicians are fans of Tottenham” – but a series of promos accompanying the Picker turn it into something special, employing that famous dry British wit in the service of spots that offer invaluable insight into the user’s new team of choice.

“Once you pick a team, you’re more invested, and you’re going to root for someone in the game and continue watching when they come on the TV,” said Stephen Rutterford, owner of Branding agency Brooklyn Brothers, which produced the 20 Picker promos (one for each Premier League team). With roots tied to London, Brooklyn Brothers could ensure the writers of the spots knew their English football, providing a quirky blend of historical context and pop culture references that made each :60 script both edifying and entertaining. A “chirpy British” narrator helped bring the text to life, said Rutterford, beginning each spot with the words “Some of what you need to know” about the given team, and proceeding from there in a patter combining history teacher with the breathless enthusiasm of a true fan.

To animate the promos, Brooklyn Brothers teamed with New York’s Transistor Studios and together, the two companies were able to crank out all 20 promos in less than a month.

“Because there were a lot of content in these scripts and they read really fast, we needed something that would keep up with that energy,” said Aaron Baumle creative director at Transistor. “That’s when we devised this kind of flip board look, like in train stations in Europe. It was the energy from the flip board that really encompassed the project.”

Transistor was able to pull directly from each Premier League team’s specific logo to create a color palette unique to that team. Baumle’s team began by creating a visual library of images in Illustrator, but upon noticing the frames “were coming off flat,” moved to Photoshop to add “a bit of texture and depth,” said Baumle. “It’s very subtle, but I think it made it go a really long way.”

To facilitate a faster workflow, Transistor used Cinema 4D to develop a toolkit in 3D for the flipping panels, which enabled the freedom to animate quickly without compromising originality or style. From there, the panels were brought into Aftereffects for rendering. Baumle called the first manifestation of this process a “visual outline” that Transistor could use over and over for each spot, switching out panels to make it unique to each team.

“[The Brooklyn Brothers] gave us a lot of freedom on this job,” said Baumle. “Once we started going and they were on board, we just really had a lot of fun, and I think some of that energy really shows through in the final pieces.”

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