I had the opportunity to come on board as CG supervisor for season 3 of Ted Lasso. The show involved the creation of both photorealistic stadium locations as well as crowd elements to populate them. It was also unique in the total volume of shots as well as the number of specific stadium locations.

 

In total, season 3 had nearly 1000 stadium shots, across 12 episodes, and 11 unique stadium locations that had to be recreated in post. Our CG team utilized lidar scans, photogrammetry, and thousands of reference photos of the specific stadiums to achieve near inch-level accuracy of our assets to the real-world locations.

 

The specific crowd workflows that we used required close coordination between the 3D and 2D departments, as crowds were most often generated as 2.5D sprites using a Nuke particle toolset.

 

We also debuted a fully CG crowd solution for closer-medium shots, utilizing 4D Metastage volume captured crowd assets. These were treated in the same manner as the Nuke particle crowds—just controlled and instanced in a Houdini setup.

 

For our work on one specific episode (titled "Mom City"), our team received an Emmy nomination for "Outstanding Special Visual Effects in a Single Episode."  The penultimate episode of the series, it combined over 200 unique visual effects shots, a new stadium build, and crowds of up to 54,000 people.

 

Check out the breakdown for this specific episode below:

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