Brian Murray, who in a past life lugged around 16mm cameras for NFL films, lowers the rig onto my right shoulder. “It’s the same size, weight and balance of a camera that I would be shooting with if I were back on the sidelines,” says Murray. Madden NFL 23‘s creative director for the presentation. But it doesn’t look like a camera.
Metal tubes roughly resemble the skeleton of one, and a few dials on the front control things like focus and zoom, but it’s mostly an open space attached to a fairly chunky platform. The viewfinder is an iPad, so at least I’m not blinking. But on this screen, head coach Sean McVay and four or five Los Angeles Rams coming off the field at the end of a game are rendered in Madden. And as I move the camera, I’m filming in virtual reality, getting up close and in the face with Jalen Ramsey or Sebastian Joseph-Day like I’ve got a photographer’s vest and a field pass.
“You may have heard of a very small film called avatar,‘ jokes Murray. “James Cameron patented a technology that allowed him to walk around his digital scenes in this film with a small, wired pad to capture authentic footage and frame the digital scenes in this film.”
Murray joined EA Sports from NFL Films, the league’s Emmy-winning documentary arm, to begin work on the 2014 films Madden NFL 25. Murray was brought on board specifically to fine-tune Madden’s in-game broadcasts to be even closer to the kind of rich cinematography football fans have come to expect from the league’s biggest games and moments – and from the even more cinematic NFL films. Shortly after moving to Florida, Murray began implementing Cameron’s patented VR movie system. Since then, Madden’s shows have been able to film essentially the same sequence from a variety of camera angles – in different styles, all lifelike – to add some variety to the game’s presentation.
The big difference? “The last room I had to do that in was the size of this piece of rug,” says Murray, pointing to a rug marked with grid lines and an EA Sports logo, the size of a closet floor at best. He now works at a much larger and much newer motion capture studio at EA’s downtown Orlando studio, where EA Tiburon relocated in 2019 just before the pandemic. The recording room was actually only completed the day before our interview, Murray said.
The extra space means that “thousands” of new takes have already been shot Madden NFL 23 — 700 in the week before a studio tour in late May, says Murray — adding to more than 12,000 filmed in the seven years the technology has been in use. Murray is correct that Maddens have historically provided various animations after the whistle or half-time gun to keep his cinematics from becoming monotonous and predictable. But looking at the new space he has to work with, I can’t help but think that now that he can literally walk away to that sideline in virtual reality, he can frame a shot from a sideline camera better.
“For us, we always want to start based on reality and then push the buttons from there,” says Murray. “Otherwise we would only have 1,000 drones flying around everywhere. And then we have a very unique responsibility where our fans are pros at watching this game Sunday, Thursday, Monday from the couch. So if we’re not properly represented from day one and simulating our game the way you see it as a pro, then we’ve failed you there and then.”
The D-Cam, or Director Cam, is just one component of a focus on graphics and presentation that doesn’t necessarily represent an overhaul, but aims to ensure everything in the game is rendered with meticulous authenticity. Typically, sports developers back up this claim with a number of how many athlete 360 head scans are added to the game each year, and Madden NFL 23 actually has a lot more of it.
But the “Mobile Scan Truck” parked by EA Sports last year in front of Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City and at events like the NFL’s league meetings and scouting combines speaks to the persistence behind the effort led by Terrance Newell, art director directed by Madden, and Juan Chavez, his characters director. The truck wasn’t just there to take mug shots. Newell tapped five Kansas City Chiefs of varying heights and, uh, widths to better represent the spectrum of NFL player physiques. Up until this year, Madden had used a single base model, or “silhouette,” which was then modified to represent bulkier or slimmer archetypes.
“Admittedly, if you look closely, all of these different players have some of the same qualities, don’t they?” Newell says. “Because they were built on the same basis. so we thought OK, let’s create accurate bases that will make the entire player list more accurate.”
The five chiefs they scanned also carried their gear in the truck, including 6-foot-8, 344-pound offensive tackle Orlando Brown Jr., who Newell says represents the “edge case” player — guys who play in the league are , but in small numbers. (The other four represented “Speed Guys” as quarterback, receiver, and defensive back; “Impact Players” as running back, linebacker, and defensive end; “Monsters” playing offensive line and interior defense line; and “Tweeners”, Who are an unbalanced combination of size or speed, typically at quarterback or special teams.)
Newell recalls that Brown had to crouch and strike a pose to bring his torso into the scan area. “He was a soldier,” says Newell. “Hold this pose the whole time.”
The result is not only that more players in Madden have their bodies believably proportioned, their gear is attached to them in a much more authentic way. “The detail and nuance of how tight the jerseys are, how thin the pads are now, evenly [on offensive linemen]which honestly even looks dangerous – all of that now shows up in the game one-to-one,” says Mike Mahar, Madden NFL 23is executive producer.
EA Tiburon also used scanning technology on the gear itself, in some cases to capture a jersey’s actual color under direct light (particularly important in the case of retro uniforms, where the colors may have been a more subtle or slightly different hue). For modern gear, that means a lot of Nike stuff has literally marched into the office under armed guard because the designs haven’t been shown to the public yet. But to complete the throwback look for John Madden, a new installation of begins in the All Madden game Madden NFL 23Chavez went to a vintage clothing store and found the same style of double-pronged belt and short-sleeve button-down shirt that the coach had made famous and scanned it into the game.
“You heard us talking about Coach [Madden] quite a bit and how he inspired our team; he was very passionate about authenticity,” says Newell. “You know, if it’s in the game, it has to be in the game.”
[Disclosure: EA Sports invited Polygon and paid for its flight and accommodations at the one-day preview event at EA Tiburon’s studio.]
