2025, 3D, Videography, aTTaX
This was going to be my magnum opus. I'm gonna come out of the gate and sy that I released it prematurely - the timeline demanded it and there are segments in there that would have needed restructuring, some animations that had to be rendered in preview quality just to make it on time. There's even a sequence in the middle that is missing a piece of footage. It's just a black screen 😭
Nevertheless, I am proud of the end result. I started working on this 55-minute documentary after Christmas 2025. I worked through the end-of-year holidays and we released it on Jan 4th, 2026. The documentary includes footage from two full events, dozens of match VODs and a media-day to cap it off. The fact that it even exists given the insane timeline is something of a miracle, so I'm not gonna beat myself up about a 2-second blank screen.
I did a ton of original animations for this video. Using snapshots of public height-data maps, I created "tabletop" versions of Berlin and Hamburg as lead-ins for the respective events taking place there. I animated the tournament trees to serve as transitions and for viewers to keep track of tournament progression (especially during segments that were constructed entirely from online match footage).
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I'm especially proud of the intro at the 17:00 mark. As our players describe how a horrible, horrible mistake on the organizers' part lead to us losing the Grand Finals of the EQUAL ESPORTS Queens championship, the video stops, the caster's last words echoing through the sudden silence. The music swells, and the FAMILY logo appears. A gorgeous sequence, if I may say so. One that I had been planning ever since I found the track on EpidemicSound.