Game graphics: fox sets the tone for the Super Bowl with its animations. (digital video).

Millions and millions of viewers around the world tuned in to Super Bowl XXXVI, making it one of the biggest broadcast events of the year. But their eyes were not just glued to the gridiron action. Even the most seasoned armchair quarterbacks found it difficult to turn away from the TV during the commercial breaks, which, as usual, featured some of the most innovative 30-second advertising spots to air all year.

Setting the tone for this ultimate showdown of football players and commercial creators was no easy task, especially for the small animation department at Fox Sports, host of this year's Super Bowl. The game graphics and animations had to dazzle viewers amid the exciting plays and million-dollar commercials, while also maintaining a cohesive look used by Fox Sports throughout the 2001 football season. "Our goal was to generate the excitement and activity that surrounds the game without straying too far off course," says Dave Thompson, lead animator. "No matter what cool or new idea you come up with, it still must tie in with the existing season's package."

Throughout the past season, Fox Sports has given a high-tech edgy look to its graphics, which was also the underlying theme during the championship. "We're not a big effects house, so it's not practical for us to create a design that will only be used once," says Thompson.

Even so, creating the graphics for the big game required the same amount of work--about two months--as generating a new look for an entire season. "It becomes a very large project in a short period of time," notes Thompson. The Super Bowl graphics package entails numerous pieces, such as interstitials, replay wipes, and bumpers, that are used throughout the broadcast. The two main segments--the opening animation and the player line-up, which Thompson calls the "eye candy"--are shown only once, yet required the most effort. "These are the first things that viewers will see, so a large portion of our budget was used for these two segments."

For the broadcast's opening sequence, the animators used Discreet's 3ds max software to create a flythrough of a futuristic, stylized New Orleans, the location of this year's Super Bowl. "The camera moves just about everywhere inside this massive environment, so we had to make sure that the models were highly detailed in the close-up shots," says Thompson. The scene ends with a shot of a digital version of the Lombardi trophy, the embodiment of the championship game.

Within a Mardi Gras scene with a Fifth Element-like feel, the animators created high-resolution models, which were procedurally textured using The Essential Textures (Digimation/Worley Laboratories) and Simbiont (Darkling Simulations) plug-in shaders, as well as Photoshop ...