Florida Mayhem 2021

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The Florida Mayhem is a franchised team in the Overwatch League, a tier 1 esport. The Mayhem brand balances modern esports grit with a chill Miami Vice look and uses a non-traditional (in esports) pink and blue colorway.

In my second year with the Mayhem as a motion designer, I created a series of gameday animations for each of their sixteen regular season games. In addition, for the team's video content, I designed and animated series intros, end cards, and other assets. I also created template files for social media use and worked on other miscellaneous projects and assets.

(This project will continue to be updated until the end of 2021. Works are rendered here as GIFs due to Behance limitations, but were originally video files.)

In the gameday animations, every enemy team is characterized either as an enemy, such as a phoenix or sasquatch, or a location, such as the Colosseum, the Eiffel Tower, or a sea of blue flames. I relied on neon vector elements, similar layouts, and other shared elements to anchor the branding. Using my signature 2.5D style, I blended real life player images with vectorized backgrounds and pictures of game characters, creating a half in, half out environment that explored the players' positions as both real athletes and in-game superstars.

The gameday animations were not originally planned; however, I felt that the templated approach that most organizations (and indeed, the 2020 Mayhem) applied was prone to growing dull long before the end of the season. For this season, I thought it necessary to give fans something to look forward to every game. Such an approach would also help fans mentally distinguish each game by adding to the "storyline" of the team (e.g. capitalizing on player rivalries and using players likely to feature prominently in the match)

Many of the team's fans are not only fans of the Mayhem but fans of the league as a whole. For many organizations in [e]sports, gameday graphics rely entirely on their own brand. While this produces consistency, I thought that properly presenting the opponent teams would produce a clearer storyline and make it easier for league fans to connect with our matches and players. Thus, I took on the challenge of balancing storytelling while maintaining the consistency and strength of the Mayhem brand.

Since the regular season would only consist of sixteen games, I concluded that creating an unique animation for each gameday was doable. After some negotiation, I got the go-ahead.

I created various animated and static assets to complement the bevy of video content that was published over the season. To do so, I worked with Mayhem staff to turn their content ideas into actual assets. Each presented a unique challenge; for instance, the Mayhem on the Mic series required a multilingual intro using gamer terminology that didn't come off as pedantic or uncool. Then, the television test screen stinger for the same series needed to be humorous without grabbing too much attention, or, again, coming off as uncool. In other words, the Mayhem brand demanded a difficult, subtle balance of whimsy and coolness. To achieve this, I relied largely on speed and acceleration in my animation-- alternating between a leisurely crawl that evoked slow summer nights on Miami beaches and quick, snappy zooms and slides that kept the animation lively.

Referred to internally as "by far the easiest to navigate", these prediction, standings, and stats templates are deceptively simple to use. They each consist of copious layers organized into individually labelled color-coded modules.

My priority with templated content was ease of use. Clear instructions on how to use the templates were also included with every file. In the case of the prediction graphics, upwards of 7,000 layers were used, with files split so that they wouldn't be obtrusively slow to modify. This degree of layer use allowed the end users (who tended not to be trained in Photoshop) to merely click a number of toggles to achieve the desired result without needing to sift through dozens of color correction layers.