Erlen Masson
EA FIFA 21
For the launch of FIFA21, EA commissioned Tristan Eaton to create an indoor pitch mural themed around Lukas Podolski's career. The artwork is incredibly detailed, and my task was to produce an animated interpretation.
For the launch of FIFA 21, EA Sports commissioned the artist Tristan Eaton to paint a mural across an indoor pitch. The subject was Lukas Podolski's career, and the pitch it went onto is his own. Strassenkicker Base, the football hall Podolski founded in Cologne, the city he grew up in.
The artwork made it into the game too, on an exclusive jersey worn in VOLTA mode.
My job was to turn a static mural into something you travel through.
A painted pitch only ever reaches the people who walk into the building. EA needed the story inside the artwork told as motion and sound, carrying what the paint on its own couldn't.
Tristan's artwork arrived as flat graphics. Dense, beautiful, and built to be stood on rather than animated.
What gave me the way in was the story already inside it. Globes and symbols across the pitch mark the places Podolski played, so the sequence was there. It just wasn't ordered.
So I animated each planet on its own and moved the camera through the piece as though it were space. Rather than pan across a mural, you travel through a career, one club at a time. The artwork stops being a floor and becomes a map.
Then I brought in Jacob Manson, a multi-platinum UK producer, for the sound. Sound design on a mural animation isn't an obvious spend, but a silent camera move through artwork is a screensaver. We scored each section to the place it represented, so the audio carries the story the visuals are pointing at.
It ran a few weeks, back and forth between Tristan and EA Sports, so the animation stayed true to the artwork while doing the thing the artwork couldn't do on its own.
The mural lives in Cologne, painted into the floor of the hall Podolski built in his own city. Most of the people who saw it never went there.
That's what the animation was for. The artwork was always going to be good. The only real question was whether it could travel, and motion is what took a painted floor in one German hall out to everyone playing the game everywhere else.
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