Grantland - David Jacoby

Bill Simmons took his legacy as ESPN’s ‘Sports Guy’ to the next level by launching Grantland.com. As fans of Simmons' work, Powerhouse Animation was excited to partner with the Grantland team on their newest venture—the B.S. Report’s Animated Archives. We can’t say enough about how much we’ve loved working with David Jacoby and the rest of the Grantland’ers on this project and we really hope you enjoy the fruits of our collaboration.

We are big fans of Bill Simmons and we were excited about Grantland, so when ESPN called and asked us to help concept design and create a new series of web animated shorts for the site, we were thrilled. David Jacoby, producer at Grantland, wanted each of the Animated Archives & Jalen Rose Story Time pieces to have a unique and different art style. This has been a lot of fun for our character designers and animators to explore different animation techniques and concept design styles. It has also been great to animate stories told by some amazing guests including Arnold Schwartznegger, Jeff Ross, and Jalen Rose.

Powerhouse Animation created several styles and concepts for each of the spots, here are some of the examples.