Design director Hazel Baird and the Elastic crew open Showtime’s three-part doc “Shut Up and Dribble” with a layered and frenetic treatment reflecting “the changing role of athletes in our fraught cultural and political environment.”

Hazel Baird: “We knew the series was going to be a powerful inside look at the changing role of black athletes in today’s cultural and political environments so we wanted the sequence to reflect that.

“The scratchy texture that appears over the footage and animates around the athletes was made with the intention of looking like barbed wire, the written textures symbolize the years of political struggle the athletes had to endure, and the bright colors mimic their larger than life personalities.”
 

Client: Showtime
Executive producers: LeBron James, Maverick Carter, Gotham Chopra, Chris Uettwiller, Martin Desmond Roe, Rich Paul, Datari Turner, Stephen Espinoza, Vinnie Malhotra
Showrunner/co-EP: Adam Feinstein
Head of production: Victor Buhler

Design/production: Elastic
Design director: Hazel Baird
Lead designer/animator: Diego Coutinho
Animator: Michael Relth
Producer: Lee Buckley
Pitch producer: Meredith Cherniack
Executive producer: Luke Colson
Head of production: Kate Berry
Managing director: Jennifer Sofio Hall

Editorial: Dirty Robber
Editor: Kevin Barth
Assistant editor: Logan Fonseca, James J.A. Houle
Post producer: Meghan Cirillo