August 4, 2025
Year
2025
Client
Smith Entertainment Group
Category
Animation
Product Duration
1 Week
With a new court design set to debut for the 2025–2026 season, the Utah Jazz needed a bold, cinematic reveal to generate offseason hype. The challenge: create a visually striking, short-form animation that added mystery, scale, and intrigue, going far beyond a basic CG render of a floor on a black background.
Profanity Creative partnered with SEG to concept, direct, and produce a 15-second animated reveal that would live across multiple platforms and aspect ratios. The final piece brought car-commercial-level polish to the world of NBA design reveals.
The Jazz team gave us a clear goal: no more flat rectangles in the void. They wanted something that felt immersive, premium, and teased the design without giving it all away up front. We explored a variety of concepts; rising geometry, stylized lighting passes, and environmental framing to find the right tone.
Key creative goals:
Create intrigue in the first 5 seconds.
Slowly reveal structure, motion, and scale in the middle.
Land with clarity and impact in the final frames.
We aligned early on using Cinema 4D and Redshift, with a style that hinted at car commercial lighting. Think metallic sheen, dramatic shadows, and camera-driven reveals.
Once styleframes and lighting treatments were approved, we moved into animation. The core of the reveal focused on elevating sections of the court piece-by-piece, creating depth and dimension through camera movement, volumetric lighting, and surface detail.
Technical highlights:
Procedural modeling of court components.
Custom lighting rigs for stylized realism.
Multi-camera blocking for 16:9, 4:5, and 9:16 output.
Surface textures tuned for high-fidelity reflections and subtle realism.
By balancing stylization with material accuracy, the court felt elevated, iconic, and fresh without distracting from the design itself.
The final deliverables were rendered in multiple aspect ratios for social and in-arena use. Each version maintained consistent lighting, pacing, and polish. The animation premiered August 1, serving as a key moment in the Utah Jazz’s off-season content strategy.
This project proves that even a 15-second animation can carry real weight when it’s treated with the same care and storytelling as a film trailer or product launch.
