Gola Mondo - Making Of

The project originally took on a distinct narrative: in a compelling World Cup match, an inspired striker scores a bizarre but impressive goal with his bum. The goal has such an impact on fans that it becomes a worldwide headline in a matter of minutes thanks to The Guardian. The development planned out for this project really appealed to us, mostly because we tend to favorite story-telling and developing characters.

The characters were first thought to entail a quirky, asymmetric, sort of bizarre look, so as to visualize their insatiable thirst for football; in a way, physically warped by the engrossing passion. The idea of scoring a goal by the bum also took part in the bizarre design of the characters, making them look like fearless freaks capable of anything to reach their objective.




Eight characters were designed for the first pitch; they were all modeled in one day, which was sort of a hassle. In exchange, we received a brand new script and feedback: need more characters, and need them fast! Our new mark was producing over twenty-five characters, so our butts were on double-time!





In the midst of production, a decision was made to modify the bum-scoring goal and turn it into a more legitimate achievement, but just as impressive, such as an overhead kick. This change of currents was due to the fact that the cheeked-achieved goal would probably be marked as "out-of-place", or look like a sardonic butt-joke, mocking the sport and the event -- this had us completely reconsider the whole project's design and animation, since every character influenced by this goal would be imitating it in a way. So, instead of designing protruding bums on fanatics animated into booty-frenzy, we had to modify everything for it to properly fit the "goal by overhead kick" phenomenon!





Rescheduling production time inevitably ensued. We started to redesign the characters under the premise of making them cuter, smoother on the eyes, more symmetric, tidier, basically, less bizarre and more adorable. The freaky profile was effective for the bum-goal, but for the new concept, we had to have a new aesthetic in mind.





The real challenge was redesigning the abundant number of characters on time. We were to stick to a timetable that made it literally suffocating to pull through more than 25 characters, including remaking their initial designs, animation tests, client corrections and all. It was no pulling-a-rabbit-out-of-a-hat kind of trick. Though, it was among the first projects where we incorporated "Sculpting" into our agenda. We sought this technique since it would ultimately come in handy to handle the extent number of characters. By "sculpting", we were able to quickly pre-visualize the 3D models of every character and foresee any flaws in their design in order to handle them rapidly. This saved us hours, maybe even days of production time.



Our experience with The Guardian was with no doubt challenging. To handle such a project with a tight schedule was something we really didnt think possible. But eventually we realized that by laying all our potential on the table, the objective would come to reach. In one month, we managed to pull through and create a spot that really makes us proud of our effort.