The men behind Cavman

It was a few months before the 2001 football season got under way when Ann Holland, the wife of former Virginia Athletic Director Terry Holland, approached the school’s video services department about an idea she had.

Holland had seen the University of Texas implement its Longhorn mascot into an animated video that was shown before football games. The video seemed to get fans excited, and she thought it would be great if UVa could do something similar.

Holland’s main objective was to get tardy tailgaters into Scott Stadium in time for kickoff.

Never could she have imagined that the idea would catch on the way it has. And, never could she have imagined that the initiative would help spawn a name for the Cavalier mascot – Cavman.

Today, the roughly 90 seconds of animation featuring Cavman sometimes draws as much attention as the actual games — understandable when you consider that the lovable Virginia mascot has an undefeated record.

Over the years, the animated adventures — which feature Cavman riding on his horse through well-known spots on Grounds and using a combination of guile and strength to defeat his opponents — have become embedded in the fabric of the university’s athletic culture.

When Cavman rears up on his horse during an episode, Virginia fans go wild. When the human version, on a real horse, comes racing out of a Scott Stadium tunnel and onto the field, it’s game time.

‘We’ve created a monster’

“Cavman has become one of the most identifiable figures connected to our intercollegiate sports programs at the University of Virginia,” said Athletics Director Craig Littlepage. “Both the real-life Cavman and the animated version have become a significant part of our game-day festivities.”

What many fans don’t realize is the amount of work that goes into producing each animated adventure.

Erik Elvgren and Matt Uncapher, who have worked in the school’s video services department together for the better part of the last nine years, typically spend 80 to 90 hours per week during football season on Project Cavman. Each Cavman adventure takes about two weeks to produce.

“We’ve created a monster,” said Uncapher, who graduated from Liberty University in 1998 with a degree in communications.

First, Elvgren and Uncapher must develop a concept. Typically, they hit a local coffee shop for a brainstorming session with other staffers from their office.

Then, after an idea has been created, they run it by Todd Goodale, Virginia’s associate director of athletics for marketing and video services.

The battle for approval

If the concept gets the thumbs up, Elvgren and Uncapher create a storyboard. Then they scout locations around Grounds for the battle scenes and insert the selections back into their drawings.

Next, they send the drawings up the athletic department food chain for further approval. Littlepage and Jon Oliver, Virginia’s executive associate director of athletics, make sure there is nothing too racy or offensive.

“That’s the hardest thing – figuring out how Cavman is going to battle the other mascot,” Uncapher said. “There’s all sort of political things that we can’t do and a lot of parameters that you have to work within.”

That means no blood or gore. Everything must be family-friendly.

In 2007, after the shooting tragedy at Virginia Tech, an episode idea — which culminated in a handshake between Cavman and his Hokies counterpart — had to be run by the university Board of Visitors.

“You can’t be too violent,” Elvgren explained, “but at the same time you have to vanquish the opponent. Sometimes we have to walk a tight line between those things.”

It’s after Elvgren and Uncapher have received approval that the real work begins. Elvgren, a Newport News native who grew up in Pittsburgh and learned rudimentary animation while working for the Navy, spends countless hours in front of a computer, modeling characters and affixing school logos.

Behind-the-scenes work

Then, in the basketball media room at John Paul Jones Arena, Elvgren and Uncapher use infrared cameras to shoot body movements that will be used in the battle sequences.

Elvgren, similar to what NBA players do to make video games, wears a suit with sensors attached to it.

“The purpose is to add that sort of realism to it,” Uncapher said.

The duo sometimes enlists others to wear the sensor suit, including former UVa quarterback Marques Hagans. Another time, a local karate instructor was brought in so that leg kicks could be replicated.

After the necessary movements have been filmed, Elvgren inserts it all into a program and combines it with the “bones” he has constructed in another program. Then some facial expressions, such as eye blinks and frowns, are added.

When that is completed, Uncapher takes over. He edits everything and adds special effects, music and sound.

When fans hear Cavman grunt, it’s actually Uncapher. “That’s me at about 2 a.m. when nobody is around,” he said, laughing.

When things go wrong

The day before the game, the video is timed down to the second and inserted into an operations-day script.

From there, Elvgren and Uncapher hold their breath that the show goes smoothly, which isn’t always the case.

A few years back, the video finished and Cavman and his horse didn’t emerge for a good 10 seconds. “We were like, ‘Where’s the horse?’” Elvgren said.

The following week, Elvgren wanted to make sure it didn’t happen again. After walking out of his production truck, he saw that Cavman was having trouble getting on the horse, so he helped him mount it.

Another time, coach Al Groh and the team were in the tunnel just before kickoff. Groh, thinking it was time to go out on the field, smacked the horse on the rear. Only, it was too soon.

“The timing can be really tough because they’re going over last-minute details and trying to get ready,” Elvgren said. “They want to cooperate with us and have a good show, but they also have to play football, too.”

To that end, Cavman and the team now come out of separate tunnels. The team is cued to run onto the field when they see smoke from a pregame device.

For Elvgren, who directs all of the video that fans see on game days, character animation continues to be a learning process. He had never done any prior to Holland’s request eight years ago.

“You have to understand anatomy and how joints move — all the principles of animation like exaggeration and anticipation,” he said.

Early quality issues

Elvgren, who has worked at Virginia since 1994 — he hired Uncapher in 2000 — called the first few years of Cavman “hideous.”

“The sense of timing was all wrong,” he said. “My timing and pacing was terrible. Something would fall from the sky and it would look like it was falling in slow motion. There were all kinds of quality issues.”

But, today, Elvgren and Uncapher have helped put Virginia in a league of their own in terms of animation. There aren’t many pro or college teams who do what UVa does. Even fewer produce everything in-house.

As one would expect, both Elvgren and Uncapher have episodes that they enjoy more than others. One of Elvgren’s favorites was shown prior to the East Carolina game last season when Cavman took on “Petey the Pirate.”

To film the water-based scenes, Elvgren went out to the Rivanna Reservoir with the Virginia crew team.

“I was shooting from a trail boat,” Elvgren recalled. “I said, ‘Everybody jump out of the boat now because the cannon ball just splashed!’ They enjoyed that.”

To replicate the cannon ball splashes, Uncapher went to a friend’s house late one night with a camera and recorded splashes in a nearby pond.

One of Uncapher’s favorites is the episode from last year’s Richmond game when Cavman frees Virginia cheerleaders from The Rotunda, which had morphed into a giant spider web.

Uncapher also liked the “300”-themed tilt used in the season opener against the USC Trojans that paid a brief homage to “The Karate Kid.”

“We try and mix it up a little bit,” said Uncapher, smiling. “Some people got it, some people didn’t.”

Added Elvgren: “We walk a fine line between wanting to entertain the audience, but also get them excited about what’s about to happen.”

‘What’s a Hoosier?’

Elvgren and Uncapher have already begun work on episodes for this coming season. Making their job tougher is the fact that Scott Stadium has switched to a new wide screen video board that is about twice as big as the old one. That means a lot of re-formatting.

In addition, Virginia has games on its schedule against William & Mary and Indiana — schools whose mascots aren’t all that clear.

“What’s a Hoosier?” said Uncapher.

While the job is a ton of work, the pair says it never gets old.

“We love it,” Elvgren said. “Creatively, it’s very challenging.”

Ironically, Elvgren actually tried to talk Ann Holland out of the whole idea back in 2001. He didn’t think it would be that well-received.

Today, he’s contemplating putting out a DVD for crazed Cavman fans.

“I can laugh about it now,” said Elvgren, “but she was totally right. The crowd has always loved it. It’s really become a staple and part of what we do.”

Virginia kicks off its home football schedule Sept. 5 against William & Mary.