Q&A with FSU's graphics team: How 'Backyard Football' theme won Signing Day

With in-person recruiting and campus visits shut down since mid-March, the Florida State football team's graphics department found itself in a bind when it came to announcing new signees this week during the early signing period.

Typically, the Seminoles and other programs will rely heavily on stylized photographs and videos that are taken when the recruits are on campus. But with that out of the question, FSU's staff decided to tap into video game nostalgia by introducing each new player with graphics inspired by Backyard Football, a popular sports gaming series in the early 2000s.

FSU's animated scenes ended up being a smash hit on social media this week, with positive comments shared by countless fans, former players and media types.

Warchant spoke with two of the driving forces behind the project -- Director of Creative Media Kyle Pulek and graphic designer Klayton Campbell -- to gain insight into how it came about, how they pulled it off and where things might be heading in the future.

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Q: So, when do you guys typically start planning your Signing Day graphics? How do you come up with ideas, and how long does the process usually take?

Kyle Pulek: Our process usually starts sometime right after September. We usually try to flood the next class -- so in this case Tribe22 -- with a ton of content, and once that period's over, we start turning our eyes back to, "How do we finish out this current class with the highest-quality stuff, including signing day?" So we kind of made the decision to go in this direction probably about mid- to late-October. We started really diving into what it might take in order to actually create something like this, with the detail and the movement and things like that, which really bring it to life.

So our process probably started sometime in mid-October. Probably a solid two months' worth of planning and then actually creating. Really, we were still bantering around a few ideas until sometime in early November when we said it was make-or-break time. Either we were doing this, and we've got to put all our energy into designing this stuff, or we've got to pivot and do something else. But give ourselves enough time to actually go full bore into exactly what we want.

Q: As you guys are bantering around other ideas, are you actually mocking things up to see what works and doesn't work? What led you to the ultimate decision to go with this theme?

Kyle: Not creating a full working mock-up, mostly just kind of discussing the different intricacies of what types of programs and what types of software and abilities and skills that we actually need to develop in order to create something like this. With a project like this, you need to start learning how to animate, which is a whole other skill in and of itself. ... You know, this whole thing comes through the fact that we don't have any pictures of almost half of the kids that we signed. So we were kind of stuck with, "How do we create some sort of likeness to the kid, without being able to have them on campus for an official visit, where we could take his picture and then make a pretty high-quality motion graphic using really good visit pictures." So, as we kind of went through that process, we just bantered back and forth about what types of skills we need to learn over the next 'X' number of days to actually make this happen and be good at them by the time we actually need to start producing the stuff.

Q: I know you don't have a huge staff and that you use a number of student interns. How many different people worked on it?

Klayton Campbell: Directly on this project, we had four: Me, Kyle, Zach Hamman and Matt Byars all directly contributed. And it was a great team effort. Legitimately, I would say everybody did one-fourth of the work. So we couldn't have done it without those two guys, and we're really lucky to have the whole team -- not just those four.

Kyle: And I'd like to say the reason why we were able to have this many people directly working on a project of this scale is because the rest of our student-intern team was handling a lot of the day-to-day and week-to-week projects that we were doing to actually continue to recruit those kids. And I think one of the things that allowed us to do this is the fact that back in April and May and June and even into September, when we actually were building out our student team, we went after some people that we felt like they could handle themselves in the recruiting world. And that allowed Klayton and I to not have to oversee every single detail of every project, and that went a long way for us to be able to spend and dedicate the time to do this. Those interns are Zach Osborne, Dimitar Kehayov, Madison Jozsa and Mitchell Miller.

Q: So, had all of you animated before? Or was this new for everybody?

Klayton: No, we hadn't. And Zach Hamman is a ridiculously ambitious kid. And he's like, "You know what? I know I can hop on there and figure it out." And I think he texted us at like 2 a.m. the same night and was like, "Yeah, I figured it out." And we're like, "OK, this kid's insane (laughing)." So, basically, Kyle has a really good background with how to put everything together once it was animated, and I have a background on how to create the graphics for it, as does Matt Byars. So we just kind of put all those skills together, and we knew we could do it.

Q: So how many characters and scenes did you have to create? It wasn't just, "Hey, we need to draw these 15 or 20 kids." There were different backgrounds and all of the other FSU characters.

Kyle: We probably created ... well, we created countless assets for this. The actual bodies are all customized to the heights and sizes of our pro players and our signees. And we actually were able to get our hands on a version of the game, and use that as a good reference point. But we also wanted to do it a certain way, so we put our own spin on certain pieces of the game. Then a significant amount of work went into the Tuesday teaser that actually let you know, 'Wow, they created everything. They didn't just create the bleachers." So I kind of worked through several different documents on Photoshop, drawing things like Doak Campbell Stadium from the inside and outside. Drawing the Unconquered statue and things like that, to make you feel like you're really in the game and not just watching a screen recording.

Q: Was there ever a point where you guys worried whether you were going to have enough time to pull it off by Signing Day?

Klayton: (laughing) I think there was a night where I stayed 'til 4 a.m., and the next night Kyle stayed 'til ... well, didn't leave. So, I mean, I think there was a point where we probably both thought to ourselves, 'We're gonna do whatever it takes to get this done. We're gonna do whatever we have to do." And I think we did a really good job of planning far enough out to know that we had enough time to do it. Granted, you also have to count on challenges that you may not know of coming up while you're trying to do it. And sure enough, that happened a few times.

Q: Going back to the inspiration for this, was Backyard Football a game you guys had played? Where did the idea come from?

Kyle: I think Klayton and I and some of the others in the recruiting office were talking, and I probably spent way too many hours of my life playing that game growing up. And I'm sure the same for Klayton and some of the other people in the office were very familiar with it. And it really struck a chord with us like, 'Wow, it really makes sense since we don't have to have pictures of the kids, because we're going to create all of them." It really came down to what can we do with what we have. Then once we came up with the idea of Backyard Football, we all kind of hung on that one even though we tossed out some other ideas. It just kept coming back to those things weren't as good as what we could do with Backyard Football.

Q: One of the challenges with creating content, especially something unique like this, is you don't know if people are gonna like it or even get it? Was there any trepidation about that? And what was it like seeing the initial positive responses on social media?

Klayton: We usually will workshop something beforehand, and just talk to as many people as we can here in the office and say, "Hey, do you know what this is?" Before we get stuck in our bubble here as creators and think, "Oh, everyone will understand!" Because sometimes it just doesn't happen. And I don't want to speak for Kyle, but I think we have the same frame of mind: We're willing to push the envelope to not be vanilla. I think that's where we were at: "Let's swing for the fences on this one." And we felt really good about it. I think that the early teasers were fun. And I felt like by the time Signing Day came around, people would really understand the scope of it and really enjoy it.

Kyle: On my end, I wasn't as concerned about [people not getting it]. Obviously, knowing the game -- and the nostalgia that comes with it -- really brings out the whole feeling for some people. But even without that, I thought as an animated cartoon short essentially, it had a neat vibe to it that really sold the cartoon. And we've done cartoon graphics for recruiting and things like that, and usually they do pretty well in terms of how recruits react to them. So I thought that even if it didn't hit home with every single person what Backyard Football was, I thought the animation part of it would at least be enjoyable to watch. No matter who you were.

Q: Right. That's where I was. I just thought it was a cool cartoon, but then when you look and see what Backyard Football was, it really takes it to another level. So how did you decide which other FSU characters to use? You've got Burt Reynolds and so many former athletes like Marvin Jones, Deion Sanders, Charlie Ward, Buster Posey, etc.?

Kyle: We sat down, and we had a list of about 35 or so people that we were looking at potentially including. And then it really came down to, "Who are your no-brainers? Who can't miss?" And, "Who are the people that current recruits that we're targeting are going to want to see?" And obviously we also had a limited amount of bleacher space. So we kind of topped it out and said we really couldn't have more than 20 people in the bleachers. So there were some really tough decisions at the end. We also wanted to include some of the pop culture figures who also attended FSU. Personally, I didn't know Jake Owen went here until someone suggested him.

Q: So how close to Signing Day was it when you actually had everything finished? Was it down to the wire?

Kyle: At about 4 a.m. on Monday night, we had about half of them done. But we felt really good. And then I think by about noon Tuesday, after a quick sleep right on the floor here (laughing), we finished all of the mock-ups. And then we were really just double-checking them. And amazingly, none of them came through with any errors or issues or anything like that on the first run. So we were done with everything by noon on Tuesday. And then it was really just figuring out other things that that we could to just kind of add on to Signing Day to make it that much better.

Q: You also designed the box that the game came in and the disc. Was there other creative that went with this? Or was it just that and the videos?

Kyle: We utilized the box and the case and the disc all in the teaser video we filmed with Coach Johnson and Coach Norvell for Monday and Tuesday. So we we had a few of those that we have extras of that a few of us are going to keep as souvenirs and have around the office as memorabilia. But yeah, there were several graphic assets that we were creating alongside the teaser and the show that we thought really brought it to life. Again, I think the goal wasn't to create just an animated skit. Really, from almost early November, we decided that we were going to try to really bring the game to life.

We really took every detail into account. Klayton actually purchased Backyard Basketball off the Internet so that we could have a good reference for the box. We went through the details of seeing what the box looked like and getting the exact size and shape. We created a mock-up of the Windows XP desktop, just so that we could put that on Coach Johnson's computer when we filmed his scene. Even the actual brown package that Coach Norvell was handed on the Monday video, the sticker says it was mailed in 2002. We really said, "How can we make this the most realistic recreation of this game that we possibly can?"

Q: That's so funny because I saw some people taking shots on social media about the coaches having old versions of Windows on their computer. But that was part of the show.

Klayton: (Laughing) Our coaches don't use Windows XP.

Kyle: We had to move about four different laptops and iPads out of the way to put that unplugged tower on top of his desk. It was all basically one prop to show the game.

Q: So after all that work, are you guys looking forward to going back to just using pictures and videos again when in-person recruiting resumes? Or is this where things are heading now?

Kyle: I really enjoy taking pictures. And those photo shoots that we get to do in person, they really go a long way for our content -- the quality, and the ability for us to make recruiting graphics for the next 10 months for the next class. Everything gets significantly easier when you have a cache of several hundred different pictures to choose from. This was a great learning opportunity for both myself and Klayton and all of the students. But personally, I really enjoy the photography side of things. And obviously it helps our program having the recruiting on campus so they can see all of the things Florida State has to offer.

Klayton: One thing we really appreciated about this is that Coach Norvell trusted us to do this. Some head coaches, you might take this to their office and they might say, "I don't know what the hell that is," and not even consider it. But he really trusted us. And he came in the office around noon (on Wednesday), and he goes, "I see you guys getting a little play, getting some stuff going on Twitter." He was excited for us, and I'm just happy that he trusts us to do our jobs.

Kyle: It's exciting when you get the freedom and the trust to do what you feel like is best. ... When I took it into his office, he might not have immediately understood the reference. But he said, "I think it looks cool. And if you guys believe that it's the best thing to do in light of not having pictures, then we're gonna give you the time and ability to make it all happen." And I think that kind of trust is is important.

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