UEFA EURO 2024™

UEFA EURO 2024™ Titles

Back for more Euros! Courtesy of the amazing team at the WORKS, team Grizzle were brought back to the scene to recapture iconic Euros moments in hand drawn, frame by frame animation for UEFA’s Euro 2024 opening and closing titles.

You only have to cast your minds back as far as 2020 for our last foray with the Euros with Ian Wright, but this time the final product ended up with the big dogs at UEFA themselves once blessed with the WORK’s cracking 3D treatment of course. With over 20 different moments to recreate and the tournament quickly approaching, we had to work smart, ready for an audience of over 5 Billion viewers!

Workflow

The whole animation was produced via Adobe Photoshop,  requiring several passes from the initial flats, detail passes and shadows, all up until the final composite in After Effects. This included numerous internal and external stages of approval to get each player on point, so the workflow had to be kept streamlined. 

The closer alone featured over 60 medium to high detail players spaced over 13 shots for roughly 20 seconds at 12.5 fps. Needless to say this was a monumental undertaking, and one of our longest projects yet considering our initial style work took place at the end of 2022. 

They don’t film stuff like they used to!

Here’s the thing, like the caption suggests the select archive footage dated back as far as 1972 and as iconic as these goals might be, they all fell victim to the trappings of archive footage. With enormous amounts of motion blur and grain rendering them at intervals into being unrecognisable.. 

Hats off to our team of up to 10 artists, who via brilliant detective work along with the WORKS team found numerous photo references of kits and players from each match to make sure we had all the details down exactly, not to mention the massive amounts of talent required to effectively make up content when ever players were faded into obscurity.

The Product 

The teams managed to go above and beyond creating such detailed and striking animation. Even the comments online are resoundingly positive ‘an instant classic’ and ‘I already feel nostalgic for this’ suggesting that this could be one to be remembered.

Enjoy the footy!

https://vimeo.com/manage/videos/1034577013