Rookie's Guide to Fantasy Football

A Rookie’s Guide to Fantasy Football

Back in March of 2020, I decided to pursue a passion project I’ve always wanted to do, as an opportunity to have some fun, while refining some skills I had learned over the last few years. It was the beginning of quarantine, everyone was working from home, and I was living with 5 other people. One of those was my Brother-in-Law George Hampe, who is an amazing actor and voice-over artist. It seemed like the perfect time to work together, while we were stuck together for the foreseeable future (COVID, man). 

We each cranked out a script and he recorded them both in the span of about a week. Mine was this weird, quirky script on how to play fantasy football, while his was this awesome explainer about Shakespeare dialogue (because, ya know, actor). 

As a big fantasy football player myself (reigning champ, in fact) I have seen countless people be confused by the very concept. The script was clear and had some light humor, but George’s voice-over brought the whole thing to life. The explanations and humor came through so well, he absolutely crushed it. Over the next 6 months, I hunkered down and got to work.

Final Stills

Reference and Moodboard

I knew the style look and feel I wanted for this before the script was even written. I am a huge fan of the vectory, 2D, low-frame rate style and look. It has such a charm that I just really love. Ben Marriot, in addition to Cub Studio in the U.K. are absolute masters of this style (and just animation in general). I wanted simple, clean designs with a lot of room to mess with animation. I had never done character work before this piece, so I wanted to keep them as minimal as possible and let the animation really come through.

Sketch & Storyboard

The rough sketch storyboard for this piece was just that… ROUGH. I struggle with illustration in general, so 40+ frames in 2:30s of animation was a HUGE undertaking for me. During this time, my fiance and I were living with her parents and planning a wedding, the project hit a huge stall (real life stuff, always getting in the way of making a video about fake football, relatable right?) 

After struggling through the sketches, I finally dove into the computer to begin designing the storyboards.  The first thing I attacked was the color palette, which I knew I wanted bright, fun colors, with an off white and deep gray. Experimentation led me to these: which I was quite pleased with! 

I developed the texture that went over the whole video early on. The paper and leather gave this awesome subtle dirtying of the designs that I loved. I also added this canon ISO noise that really pulled everything together. This whole piece is super textured, which was really fun to develop.

At this point, it just became about keeping my nose to the grindstone. Anyone who has designed 40+ frames knows that it is a grind. Ultimately, there wasn’t much to it, I knew what the project needed, I just needed to, you know, do it.

Animation

Now for the fun part. With all the designs done, I finally was able to get to the part I felt I was best at: the animation. Because I did all this preparation beforehand, I felt like I really set myself up for success to grind out the animation portion. I turned my Instrumental Folk playlist up to ten, and began to animate. Typically, I like to animate in chronological order, going from beginning to end. That… didn’t work. I ran into a BRICK WALL when I hit the characters from the G.O.P.P.P.L. I toss it up to inexperience working with characters, let alone so many on-screen at once, so I ended up moving on and coming back to that scene just to get back into a groove. 

I was working with Rubberhose (a fantastic plug-in) to rig the characters at first, which worked okay. Nothing was inherently wrong with them, I just wasn’t pleased with how the tapered arms were turning out, so I switched to Limber about a quarter of the way through and was really pleased with the result. 

The longest and most difficult sequence was by far the lineup scene at :33s (see Gif below). Each of the characters were Pre-Comp’d inside of a Pre-Comp inside of another Pre-comp where they were animated in a roughly 2-second loop (I know, I know, my head hurts too). The Running Backs, Wide Receivers, and Defensive players all have a run cycle on them too; I learned firsthand why they are an animation rite of passage. Once this scene was finished I felt like I could see the light at the end of the tunnel. Only another minute and a half of animation to go...right?

Animation from then on was the unsexy hard work that goes into projects, yet people don’t typically see. No special plug-ins, no magic tricks, just the long hours that come with taking on a project like this. Two months behind my personal deadline, with tired eyes and a proud heart I finally hit render on the first completed version (and then hit it two more times after Adobe crashed on me).

Sound Design

With the animation finished up, I sent it off to the amazing Kirk Pearson who runs Dogbotic. He was super excited to work on the project, and that enthusiasm bleeds through the sound mix he did for this. He ended up writing a bop of a song that you hear in the video which is 10 million times better than the royalty-free track I originally had in. From the rockin’ drums and base, to the killer synths, to the sweet sweet trombone, I can’t tell you how much I am in love with what he put together for this. Sound design is so not my specialty, so I told Kirk to run wild with it. So much of this video was ripe for sound design, so when he came back with his first draft there really wasn’t much to change. From the grunts of the players to the explosion of the planet, the sound just added a whole level to the project. Our only hiccup through the whole process was because there was so much sound design, we needed to tone back in order to actually hear the voice over. All in all, he crushed this, and I couldn’t be more excited with the way it turned out.

Final Thoughts

Whew… this behemoth of a project is something I am really grateful to have challenged myself with. The creativity and freedom that comes with creating a project completely for yourself is so much fun to play around with. I was really able to push myself and test my creative process throughout the entire project. I intentionally didn’t introduce any new software (other than limber) which really let me refine my process, which before this project, I can’t say was very strong. In the end, I’m really proud of this quirky, fun project. Thank you to George Hampe and Dogbotic for crushing it on the voice over and sound design, along with everyone that gave me feedback on it, the project is much stronger with your help!

Full Credits

Design & Animation by Daniel Sherman
Voice Over by George Hampe
Music and sound design by Dogbotic
Composed by Jonah Bobo and Kirk Pearson
Guitar and Bass - Jonah Bobo
Keyboards, Accordion, and Percussion - Kirk Pearson
Trombone - Kalia Vandever
Voice Acting - Will Osborn