FWA winner, Adobe Site of the Day winner and IAB Creative Showcase runner-up.

I was asked by Tribal/DDB London to dream up and create 3 web games, for a joint campaign between The David Beckham Academy and Volkswagen.

The client wanted to use filmed action of Beckham himself in-game, but this had never really been done in a web game before. I decided to use the new (at the time) ‘video with alpha’ support of Flash 8, so that action could be composited seamlessly onto game backgrounds. I came up with some game concepts and a shot list. I was flown to Madrid to film with Beckham. We had only about half an hour of Beckham’s time to shoot everything. But he was a complete pro, completing most of the action in one take.

Tech used

• Panasonic VariCam (1080p @ 50fps)
• Adobe After Effects
• Adobe Photoshop
• Adobe Flash
• A football

We had a green screen set up at Flash Studio Norte in Madrid. I helped direct the action, while Patrick Lindsell was the expert camera op.

I was then responsible for keying and editing the footage for creating the games and related marketing.

I stitched some of the sequences together with morphs to create nearly seamless blends between shots and added real-time lighting filters to the footage to help with the in-game compositing.

I coded a 3-D projection system in Flash and perspective-matched each scene, so that objects would move around the screen convincingly. I worked with the designers at DDB, who created some backgrounds and UI elements. I included ‘Express Install’ capability for those users without Flash Player 8, so 95% users could upgrade instantly from earlier versions of Flash. All the games are mouse-controlled and were user tested with children and adults for usability and game balancing.

A high-score table and ‘challenge a friend’ feature was included, so that users with the highest scores were entered into a prize draw to win a training day at the academy with David Beckham. While modern video games only ever motion-capture players and recreate them as 3-D models, the DBA games site, while it’s dated a little over the years, still remains a one-of-a-kind project that I’m rather proud of.

By the way, there are a few ‘Easter eggs’ in the game, only one of which I can remember at the moment: in the ‘Shot Stopper’ game, type ‘safehands’ to get some big gloves to make savings goals easier.