CASE STUDY

The Little League World Series is pure Americana, even though it's an international event. Each year thousands of kids and their families flock to Williamsport, PA as it turns into something akin to a state fair, but for baseball. There is food, contests, multiple baseball fields with games playing all day long, and even an area where kids use cardboard sleds to slide down grassy hills. In 2015, the producers for the LLWS on ESPN decided it was time for a new brand campaign, the previous campaign having run its course over six years.

THE CHALLENGE

First and foremost, the biggest challenge we faced was creating a brand campaign that reflected the ages groups of the players, without excluding the television audience, who were a mix of both young and old. Additionally, as a team of three we faced challenges working together with different skillsets, frequently having to mock up 3D models and concepts before being able to storyboard or design an idea. Technological limitations became a factor as we progressed through the work, even coming close to breaking our entire concept before it could be realized.

THE PROCESS

Doing some community outreach in Bristol, Connecticut, we were able to survey a local Little League team through one of our coworkers. The overall experience gave us incite into what interests both teenage boy and girl players had. While all of the players were active in one sport or another, almost all of them played video games in their free time. Deeper discussions into what they thought about the LLWS and what it might be like to get to play there reminded us of our own sport dreams, and the sense of wonder that sports can create, especially in an event that's being broadcast to millions across the world.

With our player survey done, we began looking for inspiration. While video games like Minecraft were an easy mine for ideas like using cubes and low poly 3D models as design elements, we also looked for things that gave us a sense of wonder and fun.

The Little League World Series is pure Americana, even though it's an international event. Each year thousands of kids and their families flock to Williamsport, PA as it turns into something akin to a state fair, but for baseball. There is food, contests, multiple baseball fields with games playing all day long, and even an area where kids use cardboard sleds to slide down grassy hills.

One of the struggles we ran into designing for this project was the need to block out various items and ideas before we could utilize them to create a rough concept. We experimented with various ideas like creating a 3D baseball sculpture mocked up in various environments, or abstracting the actual Little League World Series Museum into Greco-Roman architecture. The hot dog monorail was repurposed for obvious reasons. There were also issues with creating the cube elements of our world, due to program memory issues, and it wasn't until about a month into the project that we lucked upon a Cinema 4D plugin called Voxygen which really saved our asses. As the project proceeded, we kept returning to the SOAP animation in our research, the landscape of which really inspired us apply it to the hills of Pennsylvania that surround Williamsport. We took inspiration from state fairs to create ferris wheels and carnival games. We made sure to throw in a swimming pool for our 3D characters to lounge in. The hotdog monorail turned into batting cages on rails, and we took the head of Dugout, the Little League World Series mascot and turned him into a psychedelic tunnel to fly through.

THE RESULTS

Due to the 7 different ages groups taking part in the Little League World Series, many of the over 20 graphics that were produced involving logos flys, endstamps and commercial rejoins had to be rendered 8 different ways. This constrained us on how many graphics we could realistically deliver. The slow build up to the main tournament offered us a few weeks in which we could deliver our main assets before rolling out more customized animations for rejoins and spotlight segments.

The overall reaction internally and after were extremely positive, with many commenting on how fun and unique it was in comparison to everything else on ESPN, which we took as a compliment. The project eventually won the 2016 PromaxBDA Gold Award for Art Direction and Design in Sports.

CREDITS

Design/Animator: Matthew Gasiorowski

Designer/Animator: Matthew Konyndyk

Designer: Amy McCluskey

ESPN Front Row Spotlight