Red Bull Omiya Animations

Red Bull being Red Bull called us and said they’re taking over a Football Club. Pretty standard procedure for them. This time, out in Tokyo Japan, Omiya Adija in 2nd Division J League.

They asked if we could help create some hype around the takeover:

1. Takeover teaser
2. New RB-branded shirt launch
3. In-stadium graphics for player intros and goal moments

What an honour—being asked to produce animated and motion graphic content in what many consider the land of animation.

Crest Reveal

The crest reveal came with a blinding turnaround, just shy of a month.

Our mission, transform the concept into a stunning 3D animation set to be broadcast across millions of screens. 

Step One, Bulls eye! As a prelude to the later videos, the concept was to fly through the eye following a stampede of bulls atop of a ribbon as they charge straight into Omiya. The original even had our own planet asset before Red Bull supplied their own football shaped one.

The transition was a simple After Effects masking job around the eye. The bulls—running, idle, shaking their heads etc.—weren’t animated by us. They were supplied by another agency. We’ve animated animals before (like the lion we did for Chelsea FC), but this time it was a case of making the supplied assets work in our shots. We did give them a little texture revamp to suit our workflow. Subtle movements could only be achieved with frame manipulation via xpresso to cheat it into having less energy, utilising loop points wherever possible.

Note, the orange ribbon is a homage to Omiya’s traditional colours. Red Bull wanted to respect that—super important to the fans. This was made using Cinema 4D’s cloth system. Later flythroughs filmed locally by boots on the ground in Tokyo, which helped cut down on any unnecessary carbon-heavy travel. We then comped our 3D into those shots—adding shadows and reflections to blend everything together.

Step two, developing an environment to house the crest. The original concept was simply a blue void with a stomping Bull. We suggested going one better, incorporating elements of Omiya’s grounds and local architecture, along with a healthy dose of Red Bull colouring. 

The outcome, a dope concrete dojo saturated with Red Bull blue, constructed in Cinema 4D.

Jersey Reveal

For the shirt launch, here was the loose brief:

1. Start with a globe showing all RB club locations
2. Bulls stampede across the map toward Tokyo
3. The bulls travel on a ribbon of Omiya-orange
4. Zoom in on Tokyo
5. Whizz around the city
6. Glide up to Omiya Stadium
7. Explode into a dojo-style room where the shirt is guarded by the bulls
8. Close-ups of the shirt
9. Weave the orange into the fabric
10. Fin

Cool!

The event itself took place in Omiya to a crowd of fans and officials, projected across one ultra-large screen, you can see it for yourself ‘here’!

Remember that orange ribbon paying homage to Omiya’s traditional colours? Well buckle up! You’ll notice that the crest on the shirt keeps a band of orange around the edge. It’s also threaded into the shirt as an overlay and through the stitching details. But inside the dojo is where the blockbuster close-up weave shot happens. 

This probably took 50% of the production time for about 2% of the final video—but it was absolutely worth it. Built using C4D’s dynamics system, and involved a fair bit of head-scratching. As every motion designer knows, the first stop is usually YouTube or Google, trying to find a tutorial for exactly what you need. You’ll find something close—but not quite it. That was the case here. We pieced together a few different techniques until we got the look we were after.

As with all jobs, there were some technicalities that were hard to overcome – we tried to get some more realistic cloth simulations applied to the RB shirt as it rotated around but we were hampered by the simulations just not looking realistic enough or massive software crashes. The end verdict – although C4D’s cloth system has massively improved over the last few years, for this use case it just wasn’t up to the job. Instead, we used some other Lo-Fi techniques op get the feel for the shirt moving. 

Stadium Assets

The project that really kept on giving! Straight off the back of the Jersey reveal we were in for more Omiya, including but not limited to over 30 player Intros and bespoke goal animations, over 60 deliverables in all.

The result? A staggering success and all the events went down a treat. Not only that but RB Omiya won its first match in front of a new record 13k people, 2:1 on a 97th minute corner!