Super Bowl LIV: Inside the Revolutionary NFL 100 All-Time Team' Mixed-Reality Pregame Presentation The Famous Group was enlisted by the league to create a first-of-its-kind MR experience By Jason Dachman, Chief Editor
Wednesday, February 12, 2020 - 3:39 pm
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All season long, the NFL had been teasing the reveal of the NFL 100 All-Time Team on Super Bowl Sunday. When the time finally came to unveil the 100 players and 10 coaches during the Super Bowl LIV pregame festivities, more than 100 million fans watching at home and the thousands at Hard Rock Stadium witnessed a seven-minute, multicamera mixed-reality presentation unlike anything they had seen before. The ambitious and groundbreaking mixed-reality presentation was the culmination of months of work by The Famous Group (TFG), the NFL and NFL Films, and Fox Sports.
Legends. Forever.
Commemorating the #NFL100 All-Time Team at #SBLIV. pic.twitter.com/xEnUYExjFh
NFL (@NFL) February 2, 2020
The league came to us with a very unique challenge, and we were extremely grateful for the opportunity, says The Famous Group EVP Andrew Isaacson. As premium content creators and storytellers, we see mixed reality as the latest tool in our toolbox to create things that have never been seen before. The NFL 100 [project] took a tremendous amount of technical and creative work, but we could not have been happier with the results.
Months in the Making: How the Mixed-Reality Show Came Together
The Famous Group is no stranger to the Big Game, having serviced 15 Super Bowls and worked with the league as a creative-services provider regularly over the past two decades. However, the NFL 100 All-Time Team mixed-reality presentation proved to be one of the company's most complex undertakings, requiring more than six months of preparation and a team of more than 40 people primarily based at TFG's Culver City, CA, headquarters.
Last spring, the NFL invited the company to present at the league meetings in Phoenix on mixed reality, augmented reality, and the difference between the two. Isaacson detailed how AR simply overlays virtual objects on a real-world environment, while MR tracks computer-generated digital objects in a physical environment through a live camera feed, placing digital objects in a physical space with accurate camera tracking and matching the physical lighting/shadows. NFL Director, Event Presentation and Content, Tim Tubito took a particular interest in the seminar and followed up with Isaacson over the summer.
Tim said the league was going to be doing this All-Time Team ceremony and that he would love to have us involved in coming up with ideas for how to pull it off, says Isaacson. We both believed this would be a great way to potentially bring mixed reality to the table.
From a logistics perspective, the league and The Famous Group had to confront three primary challenges. First, how to present 110 members in just seven minutes since it was physically impossible to announce every name one-by-one in that time. Second, how to appropriately honor players/coaches who could not attend the ceremony or were deceased. And third, how to avoid elaborate physical sets/props to minimize the impact on the grass field and not interfere with all the rehearsals taking place at the stadium in the days leading up to the Super Bowl.
Mixed reality ended up being a solution for all three of those challenges, notes Isaacson, and also provided a way to accomplish the most important part: telling a story about those 110 players and coaches.
TFG also got a boost when it worked with the Baltimore Ravens to debut a small dose of its MR content at M&T Bank Stadium during a Thursday Night Football matchup in December. During that presentation, a giant, CGI raven swooped down into the stadium before kickoff and then appeared on the stadium's videoboards at various times throughout the game.
The Ravens project was very different from a creative standpoint, but it absolutely helped us build this [MR] pipeline, says Isaacson. [Ravens VP, Broadcasting,] Jay O'Brien and his team gave us carte blanche there in the control room and really allowed us to do a test run for what became the product you saw for the NFL 100 All-Time Team presentation.
Inside the Operation: Tech Partners and NFL Films Help Pull It Off
Once the project was greenlighted, the first step was to capture a full 3D scan of Hard Rock Stadium, which was completed in December in partnership with True Point Laser Scanning. TFG also created a full 3D animatic model showing all the virtual elements and how they would interact with the real world, as well as specifying the camera angles and cuts between them.
A big part of [the operation] was planning it all out in 3D and dialing in that 3D animatic over the course of the production, says TFG Executive Creative Director and Partner Greg Harvey. That served as our 3D visual storyboard and our guiding compass to put it all together. The show you saw on TV was about 90% the same as the final animatic that we put together. It laid out the camera cutting between the wide shot, close shots, and the mixed reality. It's basically a guidepost for how the mixed-reality elements would be placed into the [real-world] environment, so it all has to be choreographed perfectly.
The 3D scan of the stadium along with 3D animations created in Maxon's Cinema4D software were migrated into TFG's virtual-production environment powered by Epic Games' Unreal Engine. The virtual 3D scenes were created in Unreal and brought into The Future Group's Pixotope cross-reality production system, where the final MR integration was completed.
TFG also worked with longtime projection-mapping partner Quince Imaging, which built out the hardware system for the MR presentation. Quince Imaging Creative Directo
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Super Bowl LIV: Inside the Revolutionary NFL 100 All-Time Team' Mixed-Reality Pregame Presentation The Famous Group was enlisted by the league to create a first-of-its-kind MR experience By Jason Dachman, Chief Editor 
