Create!

The main character is an artist in a creative block. He accidentally notices a basketball on a cluttered shelf, which was given to him by a famous basketball player as a child. A short message to the young artist written on the ball: "Create!". And now, years later, this phrase is becoming an impulse for action, and basketball is a source of inspiration.

Considering that our project is non-commercial and we did it in our spare time, it took a lot of time to implement it - a year and a half from the initial idea to the final render.

Since none of us had done anything like this before, we had to invent a pipeline. It looked like this:

We researched thousands of photos of basketball games. Our team scrolled through all of Google for the best ones.

From the gigabytes of photos found, we selected only those we needed for the complete phases of the basketball players' movements. After that, the editing team assembled them into a single animation. We used 12 frames per second framerate.

Our designers have styled each frame to match the look of the pages of an old sports magazine. For me, it was magazines like Sports Illustrated, Helmet, and The Hoops!

It was crucial to have that page and paper texture, so we printed out each of the two thousand pages of the video in multiple layers.

Twelve mixed-media artists cut out frames in layers, fitting them together and scanning each frame.

In the final stage, we made an overlay of frames, painted the materials, and put a hand-drawn animation on the track.

In addition to creating the Mixed Media part, we also booked a shoot on 16 mm film, did a lot of tests, and even went on a short business trip to shoot the flashback part at the stadium. Also, as part of the project, we had several photo sessions with basketball players, where we created the missing phases for some movements.