After previously collaborating with the internal AFL House team to elevate their AFL Play brand, we were excited to be invited back for another recent project. This time taking the reigns for KIDS GO FREE – promoting free AFL access (and more) for kids aged 14 & under during rounds 16-19.

We were involved right from the get-go and after talking through key goals and deliverables, we presented several of our own creative treatments. We ultimately landed on ‘Stadium Party’, where our hero a family arrives at the concourse of an AFL stadium to find it filled filled with key activations and excitement where anything and everything – including the stadium itself – is a vibrant character.

Having recently completed a large character project for Node Fest, we assembled a familiar cast of helpers alongside our internal wizards to bring the world to life.

Regular comrade Annika Fleur provided character designs and art direction, allowing us to create a design system to populate a wide variety of human characters and imaginary mascots. And she always just makes those colours pop. 🍾.

Taking the lead with direction and all things 3D was our very own Cameron Gough alongside Jon Asquith who brought his famous dance moves to life for crowd animation. Edwina Joel and Simon Bronson helped with Lighting and Technical development respectively, bringing it all together.

In order to populate such a large, diverse crowd and work with so many assets in the one scene, a single, master character rig was created. The setup allowed us to easily swap out different traits to match the original designs all while animating a single character. These were then exported as Redshift proxies to making our scenes light and render times manageable.