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How are those live sports games starring the characters from The Simpsons, Toy Story and Inside Out made? With a lot of animators and tech like motion capture and face tracking.
When ESPN floated the idea of creating an animated alternative broadcast for games, it was all about creating “magical moments in sports.” Instead of watching sports stars shooting hoops or scoring touchdowns, there was suddenly an option to see Mickey Mouse, Buzz Lightyear, Lisa Simpson or Mike Wazowski do the honors.
For Michael “Spike” Szykowny, ESPN vice president of edit, animation, graphics innovation and creative production, this project is his baby. The animated alt-casts bring a different audience to sports, Szykowny said during a panel at Disney’s D23 convention last weekend.
“We took a bunch of technologies like live player tracking — we can track what the players are doing in the game and make our animated characters do the same things,” Szykowny said. ESPN brought Disney IP into the project and combined it with face-tracking and motion-capture technology.
ESPN studio host Drew Carter has been a live animated commentator for every alt-cast. He said that for the first one, he had to wear a full motion-capture suit. But now, he only has to wear a virtual reality headset.
“It’s a technological feat to track these players in real time,” Jay Ward, creative director of franchise at Pixar, said during the panel in Anaheim, California.
The players on the field wear devices that generate tracking data for NFL Next Gen Stats and into Sony’s Beyond Sports engine and Sony’s Hawk-Eye Innovations optical tracking. These technologies are then used to create live animations, “rebuilding each throw, route, block, kick and tackle in real time,” Disney says.
The commentators’ booth calls are synced with their animated avatars via their VR headsets.
Ward said Pixar wanted to be involved because the animation studio “is all about technology, creativity and storytelling.”
During the Toy Story version of Funday Football, which aired in 2023, the main toys were all seen playing an NFL game in Andy’s room, with the real players as toy-scale versions of themselves.
Blocks were used for goalposts; the claw machine manned by the three-eyed aliens brought the ball down for kickoff; Slinky Dog was the 1st and 10 marker; and there was a Duke Caboom halftime show. Carter appeared as a Pixar-ified version of himself doing the commentary on-screen.
The second iteration of Funday Football featured the characters of Monsters, Inc., and the scene had to be animated from scratch because the movie is 25 years old.
Random players were picked to become Mike and Sulley playing on the field, while the other players were just animated versions of themselves, and Roz was a sideline reporter. All the original voice actors from the Pixar movie returned to help with the alt-cast, as did Carter.
Dunk the Halls, a Christmas NBA game played between Mickey and his closest friends in December last year, was next. It was animated to look as if it were being played on a perfect replica of Main Street, USA, at Walt Disney World, with the team even bringing in animators from Walt Disney Studios to get it right.
