Juventus FC ramps up fan engagement with live character animation

Piranha Bar has launched AniMotion Live, enabling cg characters to interact live with people in real-time.

The performance capture technology was first used at Lucca Comics & Games, in Lucca Italy last month.

It enables an actor’s body and facial expression to be translated and rendered in real-time onto a digital character, with near imperceptible latency.

Through the use of AniMotion Live, fans of Juventus FC’s animated YouTube series, Team Jay, were able to meet and interact in real-time with Jay.

Team Jay is produced by Piranha Bar and Eclipse Productions (UK). It’s aimed at kids aged 6-12 and follows the adventures of Jay and his friends (Matteo, Cami, Duke and Wushu) as they explore themes of fun, friendship, and teamwork.

A special two-minute Team Jay episode also premiered at Lucca, featuring footballer Kenan Yildiz and Gioele, a Team Jay fan who won a competition to appear in the episode as an animated character.

Some behind-the-scenes from this episode are shown in the video below, which also covers the live animation at Lucca Comics & Games.

AniMotion Live has been a central aspect of the social media content for Team Jay, including where Team Jay characters speak directly to the audience, and in music and dance Stories and TikToks.

Broadcast Sport spoke to Richard Chaney, director/creative director at Piranha Bar about the company’s work on Team Jay. He explained: “We use AniMotion on Team Jay for full body, face and digit performance capture, to translate a human performance onto the digital characters. Where this gets much more interesting, though, is when it’s not just pre-rendered content, but allows for live interactions.

“We took our live performance capture technology AniMotion Live to Lucca Comics & Games to let kids fully interact with Jay. They got to speak to him and have conversations and make him perform dance moves. The facial capture is done through a phone on a headset, while the suit is an off-the-shelf piece of kit that puts sensors all over the body.”

As well as using AniMotion Live for shows providing live interactions, Chaney says it’s also well suited for pre-production, pre-visualisations and to speed up the process of production and implementation.

“And this obviously opens up lots of possibilities for broadcast shows and for content that is built around this technology,” he adds. “Rights holders of existing characters could bring their properties to the market in different ways – to appear on calls, to appear on live TikToks and live reels and at events. Digital characters could even host shows, commentate or do punditry too.”