If you’ve made our Take Me Out to the Ball Game video more than once, chances are by now you’ve noticed that all 30 videos are actually the same.  The only difference is the uniforms, logos and colors that are unique to each team. Sounds like a small difference, but this became our biggest challenge when we began the project. How could we easily create 30 videos with interchangeable elements? For starters, we needed to be extremely organized!

Each piece of our characters’ costumes had to reference a piece of art stored in a totally different place. This may not sound too difficult, but when you figure hats, shirts, belts and even socks that had to change colors, it made for some very hairy file management.

Once the animation was approved and ready to be rendered, each scene was compiled into a final project that would render all 22 shots with a single mouse click. Once the entire video was done for a single team, all of the assets would be swapped out and updated, then the project was rendered all over again to generate the same video, but with different uniforms!

Did we lose you? Don’t worry, it took us a few tries to wrap our heads around this process, but after doing it 30 times we now have it down to a smooth science!