NHL Stanley Cup Playoff - Ice Bracket
Objective - To increase awareness of the NHL Playoff coverage and format on NBC and improve viewerships ratings for both fans and casual fans as a result.
NHL Stanley Cup Final - Ice Bracket
The NHL reformatted their Stanley Cup Playoff structure and as a result it more closely aligned with a Bracket grid. NBC took advantage of this and sought to further educate the audience about this new, more simple structure while also informing them about the upcoming matchups.
We looked at how successful Bracket structures like the NCAA March Madness promotes a simple to follow design and applied a similar logic to our layout. Naturally we applied elements that fit within the Hockey environment, ICE and TEAM PATCHES.
After much experimentation we found that filming time lapse of ice melting, then reversing the footage gave the impression that the ice was growing. This seemed an excellent way of telling the story of how teams progress across a bracket system. We took blocks of ice with Patches melted within and over the course of a few days melted every team and a variety of blocks. We then took the actual footage of the ice melting and created CG ice blocks surrounding the real iceblocks so they seamlessly merge together. In any given shot it is impossible to tell what is real and what is CG.
The seamless integration of Footage and CG beautifully conveyed the progression of the Bracket. The design approach successfully carried the narrative for the entirety of the 2015 Stanley Cup campaign.