UEFA Player Chroma Key Shots
Have you ever wondered what goes into making the graphics that introduce players at the start of a game. You know the ones, where a player like Harry Kane appears in a lower third strap dressed in his pristine England kit, walks forwards, folds his arms and gives a big grin to the viewer. Yep, those.
For the recent UEFA Europa League Final 2025 and also the UEFA EURO 2024 championships, Jump was one of the companies commissioned by UEFA to help prepare the clips of the players for the broadcast playout computer systems.
Russell Mann – Technical Director at Jump:
“We were delivered MXF files of the players that had been filmed by UEFA. Each player performed a 4 second walk on and a 4 second celebration action. All footage was shot at 50 frames per second. Obviously the players had been filmed at different places, different times, against a combination of green or blue screens depending on their kit colour. So naturally there was a little variety between the qualities of the clips. The chroma key screens and lighting used had to be portable so although good it’s not the pinnacle chroma key shoot conditions. The challenge of filming that number of people as consistently as possible, across numerous locations with limited time is not to be underestimated.”
Katrina Bhatti – Production Manager at Jump:
“We downloaded the footage from UEFA’s portal and the details were added to tracking sheets. These kept a tally of what was ready to key, what had been keyed, what was checked and finally what had been delivered back to the client. Any notes or tweaks were also kept on these sheets. We could also use the sheets to distribute the work amongst our team, so there was no overlap or duplication. This was invaluable when there were so many deliverables in a short period of time to keep track of.”
Charlene Spence – Animator at Jump:
“The original footage was filmed with the camera on its side to get maximum height. So first of all it all had to be rotated 90 degrees. For the keying we mainly used After Effects, utilising the Keylight and Primatte Keyer Plugins and also the built-in rotoscoping tools. Some of the things we needed to fix included the occasional player wearing green or blue boots against the same colour background. The Euros badge and Foundations logo have every colour in them. Some players’ hairstyles involved intricate keying to maintain their distinct style.”
Once keyed, the footage had to be graded and aligned to a grid. UEFA provided guidelines for player positioning, specifying where they wanted the players’ eyes, waists, and feet.
RM: “Initially, each animator on the project handled the entire process for their assigned players, including green-screening, resizing, repositioning and grading. However, we found that this approach led to inconsistencies in the final look across the whole team. To address this, we changed our workflow. A team of animators focused solely on the keying and removing the green screen, while one person handled the Quality Control (QC) for each team – which included the positioning, grading and formatting.”
CS: “The QC process involved checking for green-screen issues like small holes and glitches that are hard to spot when working quickly. They would also flag any sizing, positional or grading problems needing correction. One of the team created an After Effects project that allowed us to easily check the consistency of all the player sizes and grades. It worked by automatically replacing the video files, and showing all of the players lined up next to each other. This made Quality Controlling a lot quicker and easier.”
The final stage involved the QC animator exporting the files in all of the required formats and different frame
Rates.
For our work on the EURO 2024 chroma key work – each team had 26 players plus one manager.
Each player had two sequences to key but the manager just had one – so there were 53 clips to key for each Team.
12 teams of 53 clips = 636 total keys.
Each full size key also had to be delivered in a square half-screen format at two frame rates.
Making a grand total of 1908 deliverables.
Mia Dann – Production Coordinator at Jump:
“We created a tracker system on Google Sheets to allocate a team lead for each country and a batch of players to each designer. This system was used by the production team to allocate designers, and it was also utilised by designers and team leads to monitor any notes from UEFA or internal QC notes.
The tracking system was constantly changing, depending on who had finished their tasks first. It was crucial for production that we kept this updated consistently to ensure we met all necessary deadlines. We used a colour coding system and assigned a different colour to each designer as well as adding a particular number of players to be keyed per day.
We also implemented a colour-coding system for each clip’s status. Once feedback came in, we marked the notes in red. After the designer had addressed the feedback, they would change the status to green. This system helped us effectively track the incoming feedback.”