Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games

Client: Progress Productions

Jump was commissioned by Progress Productions to create the in-venue graphics for the Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games. The deliverables included brand animations, scoreboard graphics, VT graphical overlay elements and other screen graphics.

Progress Productions is an award winning production company, specialising in delivering creative programmes to enhance major sporting events around the world.

The brief stated:

Sport Presentation is fundamental to the delivery of a successful Games. It acts to energise, educate, entertain, and inspire the in-venue audience at each Games competition venue; at the same time contributing to the creation of an event environment that facilitates the performance of each athlete. Combined, Sport Presentation delivers a positive Games experience for all constituents in each competition venue.

Harry Handyside – Art Director at Jump:

“Our approach was to extend the Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games vision into creative, exciting and innovative visual executions for the live audience using the brand’s vibrancy, diversity and drive in our animations.

We had to really consider the live audience’s experience. Our output would move fast and hit hard… but be legible and say it like it is. It would breathe life into the brand whilst retaining clarity.

With the large number of events, sports and disciplines across multiple venues in multiple locations, the consistency of the brand was key to signpost moments and create an ease of access to all viewers. Our solution was to create a motion theory that defines the values of the already vibrant and bold brand designs.

The brand had a simple and bold 2D visual style. Our animations were all created in After Effects using animated shape layers. This helped create a simple freedom to the way in which we expressed the sports through triangles.”

Typography:

HH – “We turned the brand typeface into an animated font as it had so many usable font weights. We see the letters change really quickly through the different weights (ie Ultra bold to Extra light) adding dynamism and expression to the whole words. This also represented the energy of the athletes and the sports. The animating font became a key moment in most of our deliverables for both information and entertainment deliverables.”

Sport Explainer Sequences:

As well as a kit of parts for the editors to use, we created bespoke graphic takeovers for each of the sports explainer sequences. This required a lot of rotoscoping so that we could integrate the animated text and triangles into the footage and create brand moments that really highlighted the action.