We were delighted to once again collaborate with Peter Drake and Jennifer Burgos at Eclipse Productions on delivering a wide range of content for Juventus Football Club’s animation series – Team Jay.

For Season 2, we complemented the 13 traditional linear episodes with a wide range of tactical and topical content that engaged fans of the show and club across multiple platforms and events. Throughout the campaign, we brought our years of R&D in character, performance, and animation efficiencies to the table, opening up exciting new ways to create engaging long- and short-form branded entertainment.

The series – 12 x 5-minute episodes plus a special bonus episode for Lucca Comics and Games – follows the adventures of Jay, Juventus’ beloved mascot, and his friends as they explore the club’s values of friendship, teamwork, and fun, all while thwarting the mischievous plans of villains Mildew, Hannibal, and Meena.

With new characters and sets, the series explores themes of inclusivity, tolerance, and resilience – all wrapped up in exciting escapades where each character’s unique qualities and a touch of Jay’s ‘Team Time’ magic bring fun solutions to every challenge.

The production challenge lay in translating the existing world and characters to Unreal Engine, in order to take advantage of real-time rendering efficiencies and unlock the incredible possibilities of in-engine visual effects and mass crowd simulations. These were featured prominently in our numerous crowd shots inside Team Jay’s version of Juventus’ iconic Allianz Stadium (complete with bespoke Team Jay extras).

For the Season 2 finale, we created a special two-minute bespoke episode to premiere at Lucca Comics and Games, aligning with the festival’s Butterfly Effect theme. This episode featured Juventus’ rising star Kenan Yildiz and Gioele, a young fan who won a competition to appear alongside his football hero as fully animated characters within the Team Jay digital universe.

To complement the linear animated episodes, we developed a pipeline that enabled fun animated content to be written and produced in a much more agile, tactical, and interactive way — all within previously unthinkable timelines.

In addition to enjoying our episodes passively, Team Jay’s audience and fans demand content that’s relevant to their interests and delivered to the devices they engage with in more active and interactive ways. So, we built a mega-screen music-promo stage set and choreographed TikTok-able dances and tutorials to bespoke songs. The result? A constant stream of fun, engaging, and visually spectacular content that kept our audience on their toes — literally and figuratively.

Our performance and emotion capture pipeline — AniMotion — enabled quick-turnaround, multi-character animation that would previously never have been possible for animated properties. And by operating in Unreal Engine, the efficiencies of real-time rendering truly came to the fore.

Alongside our ‘album’ of songs and dances, AniMotion also enabled the efficient creation of more topical content: Jay, Matteo, and Cami in the official ‘Unboxing’ of the Juventus Away Kit; their interactions with the real-world winners of Juventus’ Artissima kids’ art competition; and our characters fronting various announcements, teasers, and competitions.

The ultimate expression of AniMotion is in creating live character animation.

At the prestigious Lucca Comics & Games ‘comic-con’ in Italy, we demonstrated the power of live engagement and interactivity — and witnessed the exact moment the penny dropped for kids (and their parents) as they realised that this character they knew and loved, once remote and detached inside their devices, was now speaking directly to them. They asked him questions — he answered. They showed him a dance move — he copied it.

It was beautiful to see lifelong memories being made.

Director: Richard Chaney

Writer: Peter Drake
Producer: Lizzie Jones
Executive Producer (Eclipse Productions): Jennifer Burgos
Executive Producers: Emily Brady & Nicky Gogan
Production Coordinator (Eclipse Productions): Lisa Harmer
Design: Shaun Kelly & Richard Chaney
Animation: Shaun Kelly
3D, Modelling, VFX, Motion Capture: Sam Boyd, Flauberth Carvalho, Shaun Kelly, Karolina Jankoic, Andrei Filip, Jack Bowler, Amy Downes, Emma Petersson, Eric Dolan
Online Editor: Gordon Prenter
Pipeline TD: Ricardo Ferro
Tech Supervisor: Caleb Long
Edit assist: Darragh Pyne & Karthik Meiazhagan
Technical Coordinator: Kevin Greene
Choreographer/Dancer: Liam Maughan
Animation Studio Partner: Cosmos Maya