ITV Sport

ITV – FA Cup 5th Round Promo

It’s the 150th anniversary of the FA Cup! To celebrate, ITV approached us to create a promo highlighting the talented commentary team at ITV Sport. Since we had such a great time the last time we worked with ITV Sport, we really couldn’t say no. With this being the first time since the 14/15 season ITV had coverage of the cup, we had to get creative with the limited resources we had access to.

A Collage of Commentators

Set with the task of celebrating the pundits and with the limitations of not having any footage from the past 7 years of FA Cup games, we decided to approach the project with a digital cut-out/stop-motion concept, utilizing stock photos and any images ITV would kindly throw our way.
We took the stock photos into Photoshop and gave them a few different layers and effects to get the paper look and make all the images feel like they were all in the same world. Going for a black and white treatment worked well to bring cohesion to the stock photos and give a classic newsprint styling. It also worked really well with the FA Cup red that pops against the greyscale imagery.

Actually, ITV originally envisioned a different path for this project with a focus on typography, but after we created a few style concepts they loved what we were doing and even completely re-edited their audio to be more inline with our style (sorry sound editor)!

Visual Metaphors

The audio edit consisted of classic lines said by the commentators, for example: ‘it gives them life’, ‘you can feel it, smell it’. We wanted to drive home these messages with the imagery we chose. There were some more literal interpretations such as ‘underdogs’ actually being dogs and some more metaphorical with the family tree of ITV Talent symbolizing life. It got tricky thinking of imagery for the more vague lines such as ‘coming down here’ but we got there in the end. All it needed was someone parachuting into Wembley Stadium held by a giant pair of hands.

Overall, this project was a blast to work on, the amount of creative freedom we were given by ITV was amazing and allowed us to really explore many wacky ideas. Many thanks to the people at ITV who were a joy to work with and the talented animators who jumped in to help this project go so smoothly.

Client – ITV