Dunk The Halls: ESPN Refines Animated Altcast Tech and Ops with a Helping Hand From Mickey and Minnie By Jason Dachman, Editorial Director, U.S. Monday, December 23, 2024 - 1:24 pm
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On Christmas Day, for the second time in just 15 days, ESPN will produce a fully animated alternate broadcast when it brings Mickey, Minnie and rest of Disney's core cast of characters to the NBA hardcourt. Coming on the heels of The Simpsons Funday Football production on Dec. 9, the Dunk the Halls altcast of the San Antonio Spurs - New York Knicks game marks the first animated presentation of an NBA game and the first NBA game to stream on Disney+ (the game can also be seen on ESPN2 and ESPN+)
The NBA specifically is an awesome opportunity for us and opens up really wonderful visual opportunities, says Phil Orlins, VP of Production, ESPN. It's actually the first event that we've done that truly sees faces on the participants playing in the game to a much greater degree than obviously we do with football and hockey. So, I think that's going to be a really magnetic, magical experience just to see the characters that have been created for that.
The two primary driving forces behind Dunk the Halls are once again ESPN Creative Studio, which designs the look and brings the characters to life, and Beyond Sports, which provides the data processing and real-time-visualization technology.
Each Spurs and Knicks player will appear as a motion-enabled, animated player for the special Christmas matchup. Through the real-time visualization technology enabled by Sony's Beyond Sports, combined with Sony's Hawk-Eye Innovations' optical tracking, fans watching Dunk the Halls will see every three-pointer, dunk, layup, pass, and more from the real-life Spurs vs. Knicks game at Madison Square Garden in New York as it happens.
The virtual, live re-creation of the Spurs vs. Knicks game will be set on iconic Main Street, USA in Magic Kingdom Park as the teams play while Mickey Mouse, Minnie Mouse, Donald Duck, Pluto, Goofy, and Chip and Dale cheer them on. Shots of Main Street, USA and other famous landmarks within Magic Kingdom Park will be regularly shown, including Cinderella's Castle.
Based in Bristol: Animated Broadcast Production Emanates from ESPN HQ As was the case for The Simpsons Funday Football, the entire live animated game production will be handled out of ESPN's Bristol, CT campus, including all crew and talent.
Gaming PCs in Bristol will receive optical tracking data from the Hawkeye system installed at Madison Square Garden and Beyond Sports will use this data to render the real time game animation. However, unlike the Toy Story Funday Football and The Simpsons Funday Football productions, there is no Next-Gen Stats data from the NFL being used so all tracking will be optical.
Behind the scenes in Bristol, more than 40 people will contribute to the Dunk the Halls production, including Graphics, Production, Studio Directing, Resource Coordinators, Technical Operators, Edit team, Media Replay, Talent, and Beyond Sports support staff.
Several ESPN team members are operating inside the Beyond Sports system, watching the game unfold in a 360-degree animated space with access to over 30 different programmed camera angles to choose from.
The live show will be driven by directors Ashley Ward and Jeff Nelson with support from AD Tanner Jones, TDs Nick Potzka and Aaron Bedenbaugh, A1's Joe Mayerski and Jason Severance, and A2 Brian Levesque. Bristol operations are managed by Mo McMeekin, while technical Operations are led by Haili Menard and Erik Barone. Media support is provided by Carl Baker, Shawn Horn, Adam Oliphant, Adam Herbert, Grace Powell, and Jason Shusteric.
While this is my first time directing an animated alt-cast, I had the opportunity to observe The Simpsons production process, says Ward. As with other live productions, especially one of this nature, collaboration is key to success. With numerous moving parts and multiple departments working together, teamwork is essential to making it all happen.
Watching our team discover which angle is best for each play is part of the fun of working with new technology, adds McMeekin. You have to approach this position as if you are playing a first-person video game and are exploring the environment around you.
A New Chapter for Beyond Sports: Relying Fully on Optical Tracking For the first time in ESPN's five Altcasts, Beyond Sports will not have a censor-based tracking system (like NFL Next-Gen Stats or NHL Edge) to serve as a backup. Instead, Beyond Sports will be relying wholly on Hawk Eye Innovations' 29-point limb-tracking system.
While that provides a new challenge for the technology, Sony's Beyond Sports CEO Sander Schouten adds that the indoor environment will simplify things for his team (since wind, rain, and snow will not be a factor). And, while the massive size of NBA players also makes them easier to track, the mix of small animated characters with these tower figures will be challenging.
Our algorithms have to do a lot to overcome problems for a small character actually jumping really high, he says. With The Simpsons altcast, we had to make sure it ended up in their hands, but now we actually need to, in a believable way, make a small mouse get all the way up to the rim to make a dunk. That is truly unique.
I think a lot of people know Beyond Sports for the visual side of things we're doing, he adds. But I think this is time to highlight the other 50% of our company that only works on the data, only seeing data points day in and day out to make these kinds of things work for us to experience, all the way up to the short turns, the quick dribbles, and the pick and rolls. It's so truly believable to the eye.
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