A “football team” of illustrators has created a series of explainers for Paralympic sports

The 2024 Paris Paralympic Games marks the first time in its history that every single one of its 22 sports will be broadcast on TV. But this means that for many people involved in distributing and presenting the games, as well as those watching it, the Para sports (including two sports which are unique to the Paralympics, Boccia and Goalball) will be entirely novel. Often, despite being similar to their Olympic counterparts, Para sports have unique adaptions, rules, equipment and classifications to ensure fair competition. So, the multi-disciplinary agency Kreatives was enlisted to create a series of illustrated and animated explainers that delve into the nuances of each one, in the most creative and engaging way possible.

It was vital that the explainers were factual and true-to-life, but also eye-catching. “We wanted to move away from the typical explainer video style and tell the story from the athlete’s perspective,” says Franzi Sessler, co-founder of Kreatives. To help the project come to life, Kreatives enlisted the help of a “football team” (11) illustrators and animators, including Alva Skog, Boomranng Studio, Jiaqi Wang, Lauren Hall and Manu Correa Soto. “We quickly realised that we couldn’t just hire illustrators and make them conform to a single style,” says design director Tainá Ceccato. “In a project whose very core is diversity and inclusion, how could we homogenise our points of view?” So, instead of looking for illustrators based on a similarity of style, the Kreatives team simply sourced people who had strong character styles, had experience preparing files for animation, and could work within a restricted colour palette, and how well they would fit within the Paris 2024 branding guidelines – The Look of the Games.

On how Kreatvies got involved in the project, Franzi says that it’s an “interesting story”. While the Munich-based agency isn’t an animation studio, they did have something special to offer: a whole range of skills and experience. One of the team is a former sports physiotherapist, one used to make infographics for a science magazine, and another made video explainers for a sex education company, and, most importantly, “all of us had a passion for telling human stories, and using creativity as a force for good,” says Franzi.

Though it was far from a project that stayed within the team of agency folk and illustrators. The core team consisted of around 20 people, but over 50 people across various organisations were involved. Kreatives collaborated closely with the International Paralympic Committee, Sports Federations, and Paris 2024 teams to ensure authenticity and accuracy, and each video underwent “rigorous” fact checking at every stage of the process, from narrative and voice over to the final animation. While The Look of the Games brand guidelines had palettes, typography and patterns set in stone, Kreatives and the illustrators experimented with other aspects; “we used bird’s-eye and isometric views for conveying measurements and clear information, and hero shots, wide angles, and first-person perspectives to convey emotion, enhance the athlete’s viewpoint, and focus on playability,” says Tainá.

The Look of the Games guidelines were inspired by the art deco movement, popular across France when the country last hosted the games: Paris 1924. To reference this artistic lens, Kreatives added a “special twist” to the project, with each illustrator reimagining a sport in the style of French artists – Monet, Manet, Seurat, Toulouse-Lautrec and Rodin – but in their own unique way. A Boccia contestant cleverly replicates the pose of Auguste Rodin’s famous sculpture, The Thinker; a Para Athletics shot put player sports the same expression as Gustave Courbet’s infamous self portrait The Desperate Man; and a blind football team’s formation matches the ring of figures in Henri Matisse’s Dance. Each of these images was then used as each video’s YouTube thumbnail. You can see the thumbnails in action here, and watch the full series, while you’re at it!

While incorporating some elements of artistic culture into the project, the team at Kreatives also found it helpful to use the Paris 2024 games as an important marker. “A hundred years ago, most renowned artists were European and North American white men, and the Paralympic Games didn’t even exist yet,” says Franzi. “Women were only allowed to compete in a few events. We still have a long way to go, but representation in both sports and art has come a long way, with a 50/50 gender split in the upcoming Olympics (for the first time ever) and a much more diverse group of illustrators showcasing their talents worldwide.”