Getting into the Paralympic Spirit with Kreatives
The Paris 2024 Olympics came to a close on August 8, 2024, but the buzzing excitement of the sporting world has yet to diminish in anticipation for this year’s Paralympics. With the Paris 2024 Paralympic opening ceremony set for tomorrow, Wednesday (28/08 at 8pm local time), this year’s Paralympic games will be the first to have all 22 sports in the games to be broadcast to 160 countries worldwide. To get audiences in the Paralympic spirit, the International Paralympic Committee, Allianz (the Worldwide Olympic and Paralympic Insurance Partner), and Paris 2024 have turned to Kreatives, a Munich-based creative studio to create animated explainers of each of the sports in the Paralympic Games revealed late last July. In conversation with Grafis Masa Kini, Franzi Sessler, Co-Founder of Kreatives, Tainá Ceccato, Design Director at Kreatives, and Janina Engel, Senior Graphic Designer at Kreatives, delved into the journey behind the creation of these animated Paralympic explainers.
“For this year’s Games, IPC (The International Paralympic Committee) and Allianz agreed on the ambition to make Paralympic sports easier to grasp for everyone,” the Kreatives team explained. “Although Para-sports may seem very similar to their Olympic counterparts, they have many unique adaptations to the rules, equipment used, and, most importantly, athletic classifications – to ensure fair competition amongst athletes with different types of disabilities. There are even two sports exclusive to the Paralympics, boccia and goalball. The partners came together under the umbrella of the Paris 2024 brand to utilize this year’s engaging and beautiful look of the Games.” Although Kreatives is not an animation studio by trade, the unique background of members of the Kreatives team contributed greatly into getting this project off the ground with one mem “Our team has a unique blend of skills: one of us is a former sport physiotherapist, another one used to make infographics for a science magazine, another one made video explainers for a sex education company, and all of us had a passion for telling human stories, and using creativity as a force for good. We saw the opportunity to creatively spotlight the Para-sports in collaboration with a team of animators and world-class illustrators,” the team explained.
In an effort to garner higher interest in the Paralympic games, and thereby increasing the Games’ viewership, it was crucial to make sure that the rules of each Para-sports are easy to understand. This was the Kreatives team’s main goal. The animated explainers had to balance being engaging and informative. “Each video underwent rigorous fact-checking at every stage: narrative, voiceover, storyboard, styleframes, and final animation. We collaborated closely with the International Paralympic Committee, Sports Federations, and Paris 2024 teams to ensure the video accurately reflected the sports and the specifics of the Paris Games, while upholding the beauty of the design aesthetic of Paris 2024. The core team consisted of roughly 20 people, while overall 50+ people spread across the different organizations were involved.” As this year’s Games will be the first to be broadcasted worldwide at such a scale, Kreatives were conscious of the fact that most of the Para-sports may be unfamiliar to a considerable swath of the global audience. As such, beyond posting the explainers on YouTube and other social media channels, the explainers are also being made available to worldwide broadcasters as well as the Paris 2024 venue.
The Kreatives team also involved 11 incredible creatives to take part in actualizing these Paralympic explainers; Alva Skog, Anna Mößnang, Boomranng Studio, Brolga, Carolina Martínez (Chabaski), Fabien Gilbert, Janis Andzans, Jiaqi Wang, Josh Patterson, Lauren Hall, and Manu Correa Soto. The decision to commission these artists came down to two key points that were at the forefront of the Kreative team’s considerations: their storytelling vision which moved away from the typical explainer video style into something from the athletes’ perspective and the technical challenge of meeting their timelines. “We quickly realized we couldn’t just hire illustrators and make them conform to a single style. In a project with diversity and inclusion at its core, we knew we had to elevate unique styles while balancing a comprehensive, harmonious overall look of the series. It was an intuitive step to select artists from all over the globe with diverse cultural backgrounds and artistic expressions. We assembled the team of illustrators based on their character styles, how they represent anatomy, their experience in preparing files for animation, their skills in working with a restricted color palette, and how well they would fit the pre-existing Paris 2024 branding guidelines. In short, we were looking for artists who brought their own sense of style to the table and whose portfolio demonstrated adaptability to bend their style into rules that would apply to the entire roster,” explained the Kreatives team.
However, in commissioning such a diverse pool of talent, came the challenge of ensuring that the explainers still maintained cohesion. Kreatives assigned each artist with the sports based on how their personal art style connected to each sport, “whether we needed highly dynamic compositions or extremely detailed illustrations,” they explained. The branding for the Paralympics is made up of four color palettes with each video using a different palette. “We also made a conscious effort to assign different color palettes to the same artist since they were working on more than one video each. This approach ensured that each sport was uniquely represented while maintaining a cohesive visual identity throughout the series,” elaborated the Kreatives team. “It was a delicate balance of setting boundaries for the world we were creating while allowing each illustrator’s style to shine. We had to find the right mix of abstraction and accuracy, compact and detailed, for each of the 22 sports. Some were complex, others straightforward, and finding the right ‘flight height’ for each video was key to engaging results,” the team explained.
The different illustration styles of the creatives also meant diverse animation possibilities. Kreatives’ team of animators worked to bring out the best of each illustration style, adapting their workflow to various file types and character builds while ensuring the information was clear and easy to understand. “There were also a lot of happy accidents: in Blind Football we explain that the crowd needs to be silent during play so that the athletes, who are visually impaired, can hear the ball move around. Coincidentally, illustrator Jiaqi Wang drew a character in the crowd with a foam finger. We animated the character to say ‘shhh…’ for silence which was a humorous way to merge a very sports-oriented object with one particularity of the Paralympics and sports for visual impairments.”
Kreatives also reinterpreted famous French masterpieces into scenes of Paralympic sports for the video thumbnails, an idea which emerged as the team was researching possible illustration styles. “The branding of this year’s Games is highly based on French history and the Art Deco movement, fusing the worlds of sports and art, so it felt appropriate to create an homage to the French masterpieces by connecting them to our video series. We then briefed our illustrators reinterpreted classic paintings and sculptures as Paralympic sports, and these artworks became the thumbnails for each video,” the team elaborated.
This project is a masterful amalgamation of art and sport and the Kreatives team are aware that Paris, “with its deep-rooted passion for culture and art,” serves as the ideal vessel for this coalescence. “The explainers not only do their primary job (of explaining the sport) but also highlight the universal language of creativity and resilience. They focus on the shared values of determination and excellence, bridging the gap between sports and the arts, and enriching the viewer’s experience with a touch of Parisian cultural elegance. It was a joy to use art and creativity to celebrate sports, increase visibility for the Paralympics, and honor the athletes who inspire us all,“ said the Kreatives team. These animated Paralympic explainers are a beautiful way to introduce Para-sports to a new and eager audience. Kreative was able to concisely but entertainingly explain the basic tenets of all 22 sports in the Paralympic Games, endearing the event to generations of keen viewers.
