When Riot Games brought the VALORANT Champions Tour to the Pacific region, they needed more than a logo and a colour palette. They needed a full broadcast motion package that felt native to the game, worked across three completely different screen formats, and delivered under the pressure of a live regional league.
This is the story of how our team at Genesis Motion Design built that package — from the first creative brief to the final broadcast render.
The Brief: What VCT Pacific Asked For
The brief was ambitious. VCT Pacific needed a kinetic, high-energy broadcast identity that covered more than 20 deliverables: match overlays, team intro sequences, transition bumpers, player stat cards, and full broadcast opens. The motion language had to feel like it came from VALORANT itself — not like a generic esports layer pasted on top.
Three things stood out in the brief:
- Game-native identity. The motion had to reference VALORANT’s visual language — ability timings, map geometries, agent colour palettes — without copying it directly.
- Multi-format readability. Everything had to work at three radically different scales: the stadium LED wall (60 feet wide), the Twitch and YouTube stream (1920×1080), and mobile vertical crops for highlights.
- Live broadcast spec. Every asset had to meet broadcast compliance standards for colour space, frame rate, and audio sync. There is no “we’ll fix it in post” when the show is live.
Our Motion Design Workflow: From Concept to Final Render
We broke the project into four phases, running across eight weeks.
Phase 1: Discovery and Creative Direction (Weeks 1-2)
Before we opened After Effects, we spent two weeks studying VALORANT. We mapped agent ability timings to understand the rhythm of the game. We pulled colour palettes from five maps and looked at how Riot’s internal design team used typography in the game UI. The goal was not to copy; it was to find a motion grammar that felt like a natural extension of the game world.
We presented three creative directions to the VCT team. Each one translated the game’s design language into a different broadcast personality: one aggressive and fast-cut, one sleek and tech-forward, one grounded in player storytelling. The VCT team chose the aggressive direction with elements of the player-storytelling approach for team intro sequences.
Phase 2: Style Frames and Motion Tests (Weeks 3-4)
With the direction locked, we built style frames for every asset category. This is where the animation process gets specific: we needed to prove that our motion language worked before we built 20-plus deliverables.
We tested each motion concept at all three target sizes. A transition that looked sharp at 1920×1080 sometimes turned into visual noise on a 60-foot LED wall. A player stat card that was readable at stadium scale sometimes felt oversized and clumsy on a phone screen. We iterated until every asset passed the three-screen test.
Phase 3: Full Production (Weeks 5-7)
This was the heavy build phase. Our team produced all 20-plus deliverables in parallel, with daily internal reviews and twice-weekly client check-ins. We built a shared motion library so every animator could pull from the same colour palettes, easing curves, and transition templates. Consistency across assets is one of the hardest things to enforce in a large broadcast package, and a shared library kept us aligned.
Client reviews happened on a rolling basis to avoid bottlenecking at the end. By the time we entered the final week, most assets had been through at least two client review rounds.
Phase 4: Broadcast Compliance and Delivery (Week 8)
This is the phase most creative teams underestimate. Broadcast deliverables add roughly 20% to the production budget of a digital-only campaign because of the format, codec, and QC requirements.
We delivered in Rec. 709 colour space, exported multiple frame rates for different regional broadcasters, and ran a full live test during a rehearsal broadcast to catch any sync or format issues before air.
The Hardest Part: Designing for Three Screens
The challenge that nobody talks about in broadcast motion design is legibility across scales. A graphic that dominates a 60-foot LED wall in a stadium can be completely unreadable on a 6-inch phone screen. A composition that works perfectly in 16:9 horizontal can lose its focal point in a vertical crop.
Our solution was to design centre-weighted compositions with a “safe zone” that worked across all three formats. We placed critical information — player names, match scores, tournament stage — inside a central core that survived vertical cropping. Decorative motion elements lived in the periphery, where they could be safely cropped on mobile without breaking the visual system.
We also used scale-specific typography. Text sizes that worked on the stream feed were too small for the LED wall and too large for mobile. We defined separate text scale presets for each format and automated the formatting through Adobe After Effects expressions. This kept the manual export work manageable.
Technical Reality: Colour, Audio, and Broadcast Specs
Colour Space
Design in sRGB, deliver in Rec. 709. The gamma shift between what you see on a calibrated monitor and what plays on a broadcast screen is real. We did regular broadcast monitor checks during production to catch colour shifts early rather than discovering them during QC.
Audio Sync
When a 15-second transition needs to hit a sound cue at exactly frame 720, and the audio mix changes three days before broadcast, you need a non-destructive audio sync workflow. We built our After Effects projects with time-remapped audio layers linked to markers, so a mix update did not require re-timing every visual beat.
Format Exports
Broadcast specs changed mid-project when a regional broadcaster updated their delivery requirements. We had built enough buffer into the schedule to absorb the change without pushing the deadline. Lesson learned: always budget at least three days of buffer for format gymnastics.
The Result: A Motion Language Built from the Game
When the VCT Pacific broadcast went live, the motion package felt like it belonged. The ability-inspired transitions, the map-derived colour coding, the agent-based team intro sequences — everything referenced VALORANT without being derivative.
The player stat cards, originally a functional requirement, became one of the most talked-about elements because they used motion to make stats feel dramatic rather than static. The transition bumpers wove map geometries into abstract motion patterns that fans started recognising and posting about on social media.
For our team, the project reinforced something we believe deeply: the best motion design for esports does not shout over the game. It amplifies the energy that is already there.
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Author: Benjamin Ang, Creative Director & Founder, Genesis Motion Design
Benjamin Ang, the Creative Director of Genesis Motion Design, has more than 10 years of experience in motion graphics, design, and animation, Benjamin embarked on his own journey in 2015 with the birth of Genesis Motion Design, a studio focused on brand-driven storytelling.