World Athletics Paris 2024

Client: World Athletics

World Athletics (formerly known as the IAAF) is the international governing body for the sport of athletics. They recently commissioned Jump to create a 30 second social media promo for the Paris Olympics.

Lee Jacobs – Senior Art Director at Jump:

“The concept is called ‘Light Up Paris’. We were asked to represent the athletes’ arrival in Paris by animating light streaks around the city’s landmarks. The light streaks were combined with simulated projection mapping of athletics action and celebration from running, jumping and throwing events.”

Joao Martignago – Designer at Jump:

“We faced an initial challenge in creating realistic light streaks. After some R&D, we determined that Cinema 4D offered the best solution, providing precise control over speed, movement, and colour in 3D space. By utilising Redshift’s post-processing effects, we achieved realistic bloom and glare for the light streaks.

For projecting footage of athletes, we began with camera tracking to capture the shot’s movement. This allowed us to place and retime footage to highlight key athletic moments, such as a high jumper leaping across the Arc de Triomphe.

Converting daytime footage of Paris to nighttime required adding missing elements typically found in night scenes. We added headlights to vehicles, streetlights across the bridge to the Eiffel Tower, and glowing lights inside the metro carriages. These enhancements were done in After Effects using various plugins for the right level of glow and illumination.

All these details are sometimes overlooked and by adding them in, helped us really sell the idea that we were traversing across Paris at night.”

Charlene Spence – 3D Animator at Jump:

“All the footage was graded to simulate a nighttime setting. However, in the final scene, when the stadium lights up, the brightness of the original footage becomes visible. To achieve this effect, we created a tracked matte over the graded layer to reveal the original footage. We then added glowing shape layers to give the impression that the stadium lights were turning on. The tracking and light streaks were done in C4D, where we also built the roof to ensure the light streaks illuminated the top of the stadium and used it to mask the streaks as they entered.”