Glasses to ashes

Concrete has completed full post title sequences and bumpers for the Wolf Blass sponsorship of the Ashes cricket series on Channel Five.

Creative Director Morgan Sendall, based at Concrete, was commissioned by Sunset and Vine to design the titles and bumpers for Channel 5’s ‘Cricket on 5’ programme in the UK.

Concrete created a red and white wine 30-second title sequence and eight bumpers for ‘Cricket on 5’ that incorporates a strong Wolf Blass branding element and central visual theme using an urn for the Ashes. All post production was completed at Concrete, including editing, compositing, visual effects, 3D animation, conforming, motion capture, finishing and audio design.

Morgan Sendall came up with an idea that combined two strongly branded central themes: liquid cricketers dramatically evolving out of wine and interacting with cricket action that springs to life from Wolf Blass’s distinctive range of wine labels. The resulting sequence depicts a wine glass with the Wolf Blass logo on it creatively evolving into the shape of an Ashes urn.

Sendall conducted detailed historical research into finding a replica urn to use for the project. Painstaking historical restorative work followed, which involved replicating the original writing on the urn, to be passed by experts at Five.

The liquid cricketers and urn were constructed in 3D by Aleksandar Stiglic, Senior 3D Digital Artist along with CGI Artists Sajjid Amjad and Jason King at Concrete using motion capture data of real cricketers in Maya and Realflow on XSI.

Senior Smoke Artist Marcus Millichope composited the CGI with live-action in Smoke, while Senior Audio Designer Dino Sofos created a rich textural soundscape of real and surreal liquid and cricketing sound effects.

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