Becoming a Football Player (again)

For this project of exploring masculine movements in American Football, I will be one of the characters in this project. There will be 3 main characters. One, I will play a football player, stepping back into a role that I played 14-15 years ago in high school. Two, there will be another player who is doing the movements with me. Three, there will be a coach, supervising and moving on his own to inspire the players to move more. Fourth, there will be fans, which will be the viewers of this experience, placed into the scene themselves alongside some pre-rendered fans. 

Going off of last week’s blog, a lot of the references for these movements will be from my family photographs as well as footage of football online. Anchoring the work in the history of my family will ensure that the piece has a real emotional and cultural context. 

The body and face will be very important in this work because I plan on not putting any equipment on the players. Too often, football players bodies are hidden under pads and faces under helmets. I want to uncover players so we can feel their expressions and emotions in the men, which get underplayed in football coverage. Here are some photos of when I played football:

First, here is my design. I scanned my face using Unreal Engine’s LiveLink app and made a MetaHuman (thank you to Michael for showing us this pipeline). In the MetaHumans editor, I picked a body that matched my shape pretty closely while choosing hair, eye color, and making slight adjustments to the frame.

Second, here are some references of current football players. I want mainly lineman, who I’ll be portraying. They work with less recognition than the quarterback, receivers, and other guys who have the ball. I want to highlight their movements since most football fans don’t really even know how they move, let alone the general public. However, I do want some receivers to catch the ball, which we will incorporate as a Rigid Body. I also want to capture celebrations in football since that is the designated moment for celebrating and showing emotion.

I do have to note that a majority of professional football players are Black Americans. I will have to be careful in my movement project to not act as an authority in how Black Masculinity is depicted in America. I will be mostly representing the movement that the men in my family have made, but if we do depict popular masculine football movements, those are inseparably influenced by Black American men. Ideally, I would collaborate with a Black man in the football space for this project, but it is currently football season. Therefore, any person in the football space is very busy right now and probably unavailable. I will hold this in mind as the process continues.