The Las Vegas Sphere meets Super Bowl LVIII with a viral, larger-than-life display of the NFL's most coveted treasures–it's 57 Super Bowl Championship rings.
Client: NFL / Sphere
Sector: Sports, Entertainment
Discipline: Event Marketing
Creative Direction: Dane Storrusten
Photography: NFL Films
Media Contributors: Sphere Creative
Design by Simplicity
We explored every creative angle to showcase the NFL’s Super Bowl legacy—only to find that simplicity won the game by letting each ring design do the talking.
The goal was "larger than life". Using a simple "wrap & loop" technique, each ring would get the whole sphere for 45 seconds on a slow turntable to give the illusion of weight and scale.
Live + unfiltered. A slice of social shares from fans and media, completely live and unfiltered.
Broad Engagement
A surprise, viral moment that all 32 fanbases could engage with and appreciate. No explanation needed.
In the Details
Enlarging an object the size of a ring up to 3600x is like putting every detail under a microscope.
Each Super Bowl ring carries more than just a flashy face, each bears a unique shape and is decorated on 3 out of 4 sides, making it a great candidate for 360˚ experience.
Efficiency
With just 3 weeks to react, we took a simpler approach. Instead of heavy 3D scanning, complex photogrammetry, and other techniques, we pitched an idea for a single image that could map onto the globe and give the illusion of a volumetric display. It was the most practical solution, and perhaps, all we needed.
Practicality
With the help of NFL Films, we photographed all 57 rings from 8 directions to give us isometric views of each angle of the ring. From there the NFL creative team in Los Angeles cut and stitched each angle together into a flat image map with some counter distortion to minimize stretching. We created a seamless loop at the seam and wah lah, a simulated volumetric presentation of a ring.
