ABOUT THIS PROJECT

Since 1980, The French Tennis Federation has created a series of annual poster designs featuring commissioned works by the world’s foremost contemporary artists to celebrate the history, color and spirit of the legendary Roland Garros.

During the Day One Tease for the 2023 French Open, the audience was treated to a journey through time, spanning three-and-a-half decades of tennis history. “The Art of Tennis” showcased Paris, iconic posters, and tournament champions through hand-drawn animation, compositing, and special effects – seamlessly transitioning between artworks and live-action footage in a unique and visually stunning way.

CLIENT

TENNIS CHANNEL

OUR ROLE

Production

Live Action Shoot

Animation, Compositing, VFX

Post-production

CREDITS

Client EP: Shelby Coleman

Director: Matt Chapman

Producer: Nathan Ornick

DoP: Rousslan Dion

43 YEARS OF CONTEMPORARY ART

Each poster is distinctive, and each animated transition was designed to evoke the style of the artist who created it. From Vladimir Veličković’s detailed human figures to Joan Miro’s dreamlike abstraction, each poster’s voice was honored through carefully crafted animation.

In order to realize the unique vision for each shot as per the storyboard, multiple elements were required to come together. The transition from the Eiffel Tower to the 1983 poster by Veličković, to the championship point of France’s most recent champion, Yannick Noah, required a specific shot of the Eiffel Tower, which lands on the marquee of a streetlight. The marquee was added to the shot in post, and 118 frames of hand-drawn animation were layered in, allowing the poster to “come alive.”

A SEAMLESS TRANSITION

From the highlight of Noah lifting his trophy, a pointillism animation was created to move from the 1983 poster to the 1984 poster, which we find in the Paris Métro. We transition to a multiplane animation of Martina Navratilova, where we track the ball to become the center of the 1986 poster by Jiří Kolář.

Because Kolář created works in paint and collage, this work is in the center of Paris’ famous artist plaza, Place Du Tetre. Compositors removed construction and tourists from the frame, as the camera then takes viewers to Chris Everett’s trophy moment, re-created in Kolář’s style.

Other shots included placing Serena Williams’ poster into the historic Morris Columns of Paris in 2002, embedding Roger Federer’s championship point into the 2009 poster and tracking it to the 2016 poster, and creating stadium-filling 3D audiences.

BRINGING IT ALL TOGETHER

The planning and execution of each shot and transition required a great deal of creativity and technical competence. The piece utilized a range of tools and software, including compositing in After Effects and Nuke. Hand-drawn components were created in Photoshop, TVPaint, and Storyboard Pro. Found- and archival footage was processed using artificial intelligence tools like Topaz Video to upscale, denoise, and stabilize.

One of the primary challenges in this piece was creating a unified look out of multiple color spaces. Footage included the posters in sRGB, old footage in 35mm, interlaced SD Color of ITU-R, PAL color YUV, NTSC footage in Rec.709, up through Wide Gamut RGB. Consequently, the final assembly had to be unified in Davinci Resolve, with each shot having multiple alpha-channeled layers rendered independently to respect the original color space of each piece of footage.

This piece is a triumph of seamlessly blending styles and sources to celebrate the Art of Tennis.