Just 30 days before Super Bowl XXXVIII, Jahil Nelson and his team at Sony Cinematics Solutions Group went out for the animator’s equivalent of the Hail Mary pass that made Doug Flutie a legend. Completing their assignment — a two-minute animated promo designed to splash PlayStation 2 “NFL GameDay” all over the world’s most-watched TV event — would earn Sony’s talented young artists visibility for their work and validation for their speedy new Mac platform.

The stakes were high. A win would prove to Sony Marketing that, in addition to the pre-rendered full-motion video and cinematic sequences they specialize in, the animators were ready to take on prestigious TV commercials. It would help convince industry execs that a small, tech-savvy group could create broadcast work as dazzling as that of the fancy agencies they habitually hired. And it would confirm that their investment in XServe with RAID was the obvious next step for computer-generated imagery (CGI).

Still, delivering the promo on such an impossibly short timeline was a test even Nelson admits was daunting. “If you asked me whether we could put out a two-minute, all-CG [computer-generated] piece with facial capture and motion capture in one month, I’d have said no way,” he confesses. “We usually have three months for a project like that. But our product development team didn’t have the resources to do it, and our outside agencies wouldn’t touch it — they said there wasn’t enough time. That’s when Marketing came to us.”

Jumping into Action

Exiting the pitch meeting, Nelson’s boss, Scott McMahon, lobbed the Flutie-like pass. “He grabbed our team and said, ‘Our lives are going to be really hectic for the next month!’” recalls Nelson with a laugh. “It was our first piece for marketing and our first project for broadcast — and the next day I was on a plane.”

Working with project supervisor Gene Strocco, Nelson was assigned to style the promo as a spoof of the CBS pre-game show “The NFL Today” using high-end animation of hosts Boomer Esiason, Dan Marino, Jim Nantz and Deion Sanders. He was primed for the graphic and technical challenges. “I’m sort of the engineer among our artists,” he says. He built and maintains the suite of new Xserves and Xserve RAID storage area networks (SANs), Power Macs and PowerBooks on which his San Diego-based group of 14 runs Final Cut Pro, DVD Studio Pro, Shake, Maya and After Effects to craft both ultra-realistic and cartoon-style high-res animation.

“He grabbed our team and said, ‘Our lives are going to be really hectic for the next month!’ It was our first piece for marketing and our first project for broadcast — and the next day I was on a plane.”

As soon as they got the go-ahead, Sony sent a team to the CBS New York studio. “They captured 3D scans of Boomer, Dan, Jim and Deion as data for the model we would build in Maya,” Nelson explains. “We take a picture of the subject while scanning all the dimensions — for example, the nose is two inches closer to the camera than the eyes. Then the subject turns and we take another picture. We do this five times at 30° intervals, plus we shoot the top of their heads.” Back at the shop, a Maya artist stitches together the data, using digital stills to touch up any rough areas.

The San Diego RAID-ers

Meanwhile, Nelson flew to Boston to shoot audio and reference images of the four hosts during their pre-game show for the semi-final between the Indianapolis Colts and the New England Patriots. Later, these images would show Maya artists how to animate the models they built from the New York shoot. Because no one knew which teams would advance to the finals, Nelson had to film all 12 possibilities: offense, defense and special teams for the four semi-finalists. But the veteran NFL hosts nailed the complex shoot. “They’re one-take wonders,” says Nelson. “We whipped through all the scenarios in under two hours.”

Nelson learned on his return flight that the Patriots would face the Carolina Panthers — and immediately started making notes and preliminary edits in Final Cut Pro. “The Apple solution makes us all more equal and versatile,” he says. “Any of our crew can edit on our PowerBooks, anywhere.” Working on the plane kept the project in motion. “We were able to get going as soon as I landed,” he adds. “I ran from the airport to the office, where people were waiting for me to jump into digitize mode.”

The new Apple hardware proved essential to meeting the crazy deadline. “Our XServe RAID digitizing stations are a huge time-saver,” says Nelson, “because we get immediate access to our media from anywhere in the building.”

Next page: Just Two Weeks to Kickoff