Something for the FIFA World Cup

written on Friday, 16th July, 2010

How we created a trailer for the FIFA World Cup in South Afrika!

Some time age in may, a TV guy from the german ARD Sportschau TV show asked us to create a short trailer for the FIFA world cup in South Afrika. He really liked our music video for Wallis Bird, so his idea was to create something with that style.

The idea of trailer was to emphazise the viewers in Germany to participate in the world cup with home made videos they could upload to Youtube. The best were chosen by the editorial department and aired on TV after the matches.

We shot the trailer in three days with our 5d mk2 in our basement studio. We rigged the camera over a wooden table and hooked it to a laptop for a live image preview. Our workflow turned out to be very simple, because there was hardly any compositing involved. Everything you see on the table was animated by our hands. After two days of animating at 10fps we had an image sequence of our animation.

Now the more difficult part began. As you can see there is a smooth camera movement going back and forth. This was created the same way as we did it for the Wallis Bird music video. We back-projected our image sequence on a white screen and placed a tracking grid in front of it. Then we filmed the screen with our animation and thus created the camera movement. After matchmoving the filmed video we placed the virtual camera in After Effects in front of our image sequence. So after that and after creating the rough look with some lens distortion we rendered the final video.

People Involved: Christoph Pietsch
Philipp Käßbohrer
Robert Windisch
Jakob Beurle
Matthias Schulz

Gallery: ARD Sportschau Trailer

The entire gallery