Red Bull Omiya | Football Shirt Reveal

The Omiya Ardija takeover

Red Bull being Red Bull called Grizzle up and said they were taking over a football club. Pretty standard procedure for them. This time, it’s out in Tokyo, Japan: Omiya Ardija in the 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.

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

First off, the orange ribbon is a homage to Omiya’s traditional colours. Red Bull wanted to respect that—super important to the fans. You’ll notice later in the animation 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.

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.

The ribbon? That was made using Cinema 4D’s cloth system.

The Tokyo stadium flythroughs were filmed 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.

VFX Breakdown

50% of time to produce :

Now, inside the dojo is where the blockbuster close-up weave shot happens. Probably took 50% of the production time for about 10% 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 is 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 top get the feel for the shirt moving.