Brief
The main goal of the project was to celebrate an event awaited for 33 years. Working closely with the client, I identified their needs, goals, and key messages in order to provide a winning solution from all perspectives.
Context
Before delving into the concept study, it is important to understand the context in which the highlighted needs in the brief arise. In the long history of SSC Napoli, the title of Italian champions 'Scudetto' has been achieved only twice, in 1987 and 1990. Leading Napoli to those successes was Diego Armando Maradona, a player who is considered the greatest of all time and a football deity.
Research and Concept
After exploring various concepts and gathering different visual references, we decided to focus the visual concept of the project on the idea of a Dream. This term is recurrent in the vocabulary of the Napoli supporters, encapsulating the desire to see the city in celebration.
Concepts
• Dawn of a new era, a new day (visual metaphor).
• Passing the torch from those who represent the old era to those who represent the new era.
• Evoking emotions by depicting the connection between the animation's protagonists: the team, the city, and the fans.
• Conveying the sense of gratification for a long-awaited and hard-fought victory.
• Using warm and bright colors in the palette to evoke the golden hour and dawn, with blue as an accent color.
• Incorporating lens flares and lights to enrich the illustrated composition and reinforce the concept of a dream.
• Passing the torch from those who represent the old era to those who represent the new era.
• Evoking emotions by depicting the connection between the animation's protagonists: the team, the city, and the fans.
• Conveying the sense of gratification for a long-awaited and hard-fought victory.
• Using warm and bright colors in the palette to evoke the golden hour and dawn, with blue as an accent color.
• Incorporating lens flares and lights to enrich the illustrated composition and reinforce the concept of a dream.
Storytelling e Visual
The concepts served as a solid guides for creating the storyboard, which illustrates Maradona "handing over" the Scudetto trophy to the team, first flying it over certain areas of the city and then placing it in the hands of the captain inside the stadium.
For this project, I found it sensible to work on two mood boards—one for the illustration style and the second generated with Dall-E, which was less precise in terms of style but very useful for determining the indicated color palette.
Approach
Like every project, a thorough analysis of the storyboard and moodboard was necessary to understand how to approach the creation of illustrations and graphic layouts without creating any stylistic differences.
Design, modeling and illustration
The majority of the illustrations were created in ProCreate using approximately four brushes (Monoline, Noise, Grunge, Charcoal Pencil) for filling, stylizing textures, and creating a grayscale gradient effect.
Some elements, such as the background of the final cover, the external stadium, the stage with the players, and the silhouette of the trophy, were created in Adobe Illustrator and later stylized in ProCreate.
Other elements, such as the rotating trophy over the city, the ribbons on the trophy, the stadium interior including stands, fans, and grass, as well as the text package in the final cover, were modeled and animated in Maxon Cinema 4D.
Compositing and animation
All the elements, characters, and landscapes were initially created in grayscale so that they could be composited in Adobe After Effects, which contains effects that allow remapping of grayscale to other colors. These effects enabled me to manage the colors while maintaining balance in each scene.
Using After Effects, I animated camera movements, landscapes, and characters. For the characters, I utilized DUIK to create rigs for a large portion of them.
Animation
Using After Effects, I animated camera movements, landscapes, and characters.
Here's a list of scripts, plugins and tool I've used to make it look better:
• Tritone, Tint and Colorama for color mangement
• Curves, Levels for color contrast management
• Camera Lens blur (Hexagon) for blur foreground and background in some scenes
• Noise HLS and Scatter for stylize illustration when blurred
• Duik Bassel for rigging characters
• Red Giant Optical Glow
Shots
