The real Halftime Show was in Clash Royale!
During Super Bowl weekend 2026, an unexpected virtual event took place in Clash Royale: a live Lil Wayne concert held in the game’s arena, featuring interactions with some of its most iconic characters.
More than 50 million people saw this ambitious event created by Gizmo Animation Studios for Supercell and Uncommon Creative Studio, where I had the honor of participating as an Animator under the direction of Ema Verruno and the supervision of Fede Gimeno.
Filling the arena with characters from the Clash universe was a major challenge due to the amount of content that had to be produced in a short period of time. In total, my contribution exceeded 1 minute of keyframe animation, completed over roughly 3 weeks, including multiple feedback rounds and adjustments along the way. It was a great challenge to meet every deadline without delays while maintaining the required final quality.
Although some parts of the project involved cleaning up mocap data after retargeting it to the franchise's characters, all the shots I worked on required keyframe animation to achieve a more stylized result.
Since many characters were performing similar actions within the same scene, we created a motion library that included standing up, running, pointing, adjusting props, pulling ropes, pushing, and carrying objects, along with variations to avoid everyone performing the exact same movement at the same time. Some animations were designed as coordinated cooperative actions, like pulling a rope to deploy parts of the stage, while others were intentionally more chaotic and less synchronized, such as pushing heavy objects with brute force. Because of this, I had to ensure the animations looped smoothly while still maintaining subtle offsets.
Even though Gizmo did an incredible job during pre-production and generated mocap data for several of these animations, we decided to start from scratch in production, using our own references to iterate faster and pursue new ideas. The project moved at a very fast pace, so we went from shooting reference footage to blocking in stepped mode and polishing in splines within just a few days per stage.
Fortunately, communication flowed very naturally with the Director Ema Verruno and the Animation Supervisor Fede Gimeno, allowing us to move forward confidently at every step.
If you'd like to see the full behind-the-scenes breakdown of the project, including the shoot and different production stages, check out Gizmo Animation Studios' project page.
