Nike knows that footballing passions can't always be contained on the playing field. So their long-awaited offering for Euro 2004, "The Other Game", shows Brazil and Portugal's raucous rivalry breaking out in the tunnel before they even hit the pitch. Ronaldo, Ronaldinho, Roberto Carlos, Denilson, Figo and Cristian Ronaldo battle it out in a illicit match until a frustrated ref brings proceedings to a halt with a stern tackle on the near-unstoppable Ronaldinho. The spot was worked on by a core team of four from The Mill, requiring over two-months of 2D and 3D post-production.

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Since it's not cost-effective to fill an entire stadium with a hundred thousand extras, The Mill's main contribution came in the form of crowd replication. Lead 3D, Jordi Bares, generated up to 93,000 3D extras through a combination of Motion Capture and Lord of the Rings software, Massive.

Using video footage of real games, Jordi studied the national psychology of both team's fan base to ensure that each 3D fan behaved in a genuine way. He shot test DV footage of foottie crowds for additional reference. Using Massive, Jordi gave each fan artificial intelligence so that they would interact correctly with one and other and the environment.

Jordi designed 300 different textures derived from the shoot's extras; when combined they produced thousands of combinations so the same character is never duplicated. Each individual's 'acting' was determined by one of 108 movements generated in motion capture. When shooting the motion capture sequences, Jordi projected real footage against the studio wall so that actors had a reference of how fans behave in crowds.

When creating these CG characters, Jordi had to take into consideration additional factors, such as whether the CG fan was female, whether he/she was a policeman and so on. He also made allowances for grouping conditions, for example - he made sure Brazilians were more elated and energetic when grouped together. Working on a correct distribution of Portuguese fans compared to Brazilian fans also necessitated some patient calculation. "To do convincing crowd replication on this scale," says Jordi, "takes lot of time and hard hand work."

Fellow lead 3D artist, Hitesh Patel, complimented Jordi's CG extras with football paraphernalia like flags and streamers. Each shot requiring crowd replication was tracked meticulously so that the all 3D elements would exactly match the geography of live-action sequences.

Some crowd replication was achieved through a combination of 2D and 3D techniques. Crowds were artificially multiplied in 2D by shooting multiple passes of the stadium, from one fixed camera angle, and filling different sections with the same small group of extras. These passes were then seamlessly joined in Flame to create an illusion of a full stadium. The Mill faked tens of thousands of fans from a group that, in reality, only consisted of five hundred.

The Mill's 2D team helped out by speeding up certain action shots to make them even more dynamic. They also imparted their magician's skills by compositing entirely different shots to create ideal scenarios. For example, scenes showing the tunnel spilling out onto the pitch were in fact a marriage of two separate shots: due to the complicated logistics of the shoot, each tunnel shot actually had a race track in its foreground and had to be composited with shots of the football pitch.

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Words: Sadie Paris