EA SPORTS: REAL-TIME HAALAND EXPERIENCE
When EA Sports needed something unforgettable for for their FC 24 launch event, they knew they could count on us.
So we went to work, building a fully interactive real-time model of the biggest football star on the planet. And then unleashing him on hundreds of unsuspecting football fans.
Digi-Haaland spent the night laughing, dancing and blowing minds with a host of guests and VIPs, including Stormzy, Ronaldinho, Luis Figo and the man of the hour himself.
MO-CAP SUITS, REAL-TIME TECH and the best striker of a generation…
“It looks exactly the same!” …says Erling Haaland, cracking a smile. It’s an uncomplicated assessment but one that makes my heart beat faster. I walk away for a second to process what's happening.
Somewhere behind us Didier Drogba watches, eyebrow raised. Somewhere above a Mill team sits hidden by black drapes, tired and overheated, eyes on screens and cameras. It’s been a long road to get here, and those few words from Erling Haaland have proven, beyond question, that we’ve reached our destination.
We're in a northern quarter of Amsterdam, inside an old industrial building that is, on this particular evening, alive with light and noise.
And there’s Haaland himself, the first ever EA FC cover star, the most high-profile player on the planet, studying a piece of Mill work, laughing and smiling as he tries to figure it out. He produces a smartphone and starts shooting the avatar. I feel like I’m hallucinating.
I’m not. Next to me, our producer Samira whispers ground-floor intel into a walkie-talkie, bringing me back to earth. Her comments fly skyward to the draped-off balcony where our EP, Cass, sits ready to receive them. Cass calls across the balcony to Joshi — a professional dancer in a mo-cap suit who fearlessly puppeteers Digi-Haaland. He has been studying his muse for weeks, building to this moment. Beyond him, Martin stands watching the hardware setup he devised, a bespoke mix of powerful technologies that facilitate this magic. Jayleen and Cris flank him, eyeballing monitors and triggering the more detailed movements of the Haaland model when an interaction requires it. They are the engine room, the heart of the operation. Their efforts are tireless.
The people below them see none of this. They look at the avatar they see only Haaland. And right now, the person seeing him closest is Isabel Haugseng Johansen, Erling’s long-time girlfriend. She waves at Digi-Haaland and he waves back. She seems unnerved by its authenticity, unsure of what to feel about something that both is and isn’t the Erling she knows. It’s fascinating to watch her, and I do, until a few moments later she is ushered away, needed elsewhere in the event. As Isabel breezes past me she talks animatedly about Digi-Haaland. I catch the tail end of a sentence:
“…a little creepy! It’s so much like him!”
I think about this for a second, and suddenly my mind is rolling back through weeks of planning, designing, writing, researching, casting and rehearsing. I’m thinking about the moments when it felt like it might not work. And those when it felt like it couldn’t possibly (there were a couple). But here we are, when it counts, with an avatar so realistic it’s spooking the one person that knows Erling better than anybody.
I think we can consider that a success.
Erling is looking at himself. Or, at least, a version of himself. Like Erling, it is precisely six feet four inches tall. It has the same toothy grin and wild mane of hair. It moves like him, stands like him and perfectly mirrors his mannerisms as he stalks around it.
Only one of these men is human. The other is a real-time CG avatar, several months in the making. A project developed by The Mill across our London and New York teams, working closely with Uncommon and EA Sports. We call him Digi-Haaland. He lives in a huge LED screen, framed by the luminous turf and vast skeleton of the Etihad Stadium. He can do anything you can do (and will often do it better, as many will find out when they try, throughout the night, to out-dance him.)
Tonight he’s with hundreds of us in the Kromhouthal, a steel-and-concrete ex-factory once used to manufacture marine engines. The occasion is a big one — the launch of EA FC 24, EA Sports’ first football release since their much-publicised split from the FIFA organisation. Expectations are high and it’s absolutely critical that this launch exceeds them. It needs to feel like a new era, the future, and for weeks we’ve been sketching out plans to help them bring it to life. It’s thrilling to be here and feel that happen.
The Kromhouthal is filled to capacity with celebrities — DJs, rappers and icons of the gaming world. The crowd is loud and the energy is palpable. There’s music and dancing and millions of screens. There’s Ronaldinho, Luis Figo and Stormzy…
