Gay Games Chicago

The Gay Games is the world’s largest sporting and cultural event organized by and specifically for LGBT athletes, artists, musicians, and others. When the games came to Chicago in 2006, Jam Events, producers of the opening and closing ceremonies, asked Mightybytes to participate in several video and animation projects.

OUR APPROACH

With a production schedule driven by the hard deadline of opening ceremonies, we were asked for two primary deliverables:

• Produce a video tribute to Olympian Tom Waddell, founder of the games.
• Create motion graphics and animation for various digital signage displays throughout Soldier Field.

The second deliverable included over a dozen animated loops with key event messaging. Early planning for the video consisted of working with the Jam crew to find a location for video shoots, coordinating schedules, scripts, teleprompters, lighting, and so on. For the graphics loops we began compiling media assets and devising creative concepts for each loop to fit within the specs of the display on which it would be seen.

IMPLEMENTATION

We shot the tribute video in HD against a green screen using a tapeless workflow, which allowed for easy onsite organization of footage and edit files. Once the shoot was complete, the fine folks at Red Car edited the tribute video, allowing us to concentrate on creating, tweaking and rendering dozens of After Effects files to meet the exacting standards of each display system at Soldier Field.

THE RETURN

Thanks to the efficient team at Jam Events, the Gay Games’ opening ceremonies was a slick affair with thousands of attendees and appearances by everyone from the mayor of Chicago to Margaret Cho. The event was later chosen as a finalist in a prestigious industry awards contest and we produced a five-minute highlights reel to showcase all the stellar work that made the event such a success.