FIFA20 REVEAL CAMPAIGN
Our friends at EA Sports asked us for a creative concept to launch FIFA20. It was the first FIFA game in a long time to have a street mode (known as Volta) and this was something they wanted to tease in the film. As ever, they were speaking to a young gamer audience on social — people with infamously low attention spans who are pretty much permanently online. A hard demographic to crack. But that’s nothing a good eyeball scorching can’t solve.
We knew we needed something that would ignite social feeds and work in a variety of lengths and formats across different platforms. So we designed this wild and modular film, creating some high-energy craziness that could be pulled apart to form a million different versions
This film originally starred Neymar but we had to cut him out due to... reasons. Personally I don’t think you miss him.
This spot won a bronze Clio.
SOME BACKGROUND:
BRIEF
Create an impactful launch campaign for the highly anticipated release of FIFA 2020 with captivating visuals designed to engage FIFA’s young social audience.
STORY
EA’s iconic FIFA football game launches once a year, every year — a unique and hugely demanding release cycle that they have followed for over two decades. All posing an incredibly exciting challenge for the team.
How do you further elevate the launch of FIFA to an even greater level? Keep the format fresh, and appeal to new gamers, while satisfying the die-hards who are twenty-plus years into playing?
We wanted to design something with genuine visual impact to connect to a young social audience mainly on Instagram and Youtube. Engineered for action and energy and, above all, attitude.
Mill Director Carl Addy, known for graphic, design-driven filmmaking needed to create a fresh, attention-grabbing look. Immediately he elevated the creative concept and quickly had us exploring a world of neon dreamscapes, concrete citadels, creating a deftly cool journey through the electric clouds of energy.
From strategic thinking to creative concept, from director’s treatment to VFX tests the project was built from the ground up. Traveling to Paris and Kiev for two very different shoots in order to capture the finest brutalist architecture, all lit by truly insane lighting techniques.
Intense post-production followed; encompassing precision compositing, cinematic layered track shots, and endless hacked style glitch design animation. All complemented by a super slick grade from Mill Colourist Tom Mangham.
The campaign reach and impact was further bolstered by the creation of six custom-built mini-films for social, using the reveal film as a stylistic template. The goal to reach the widest audience possible, allowing users to encounter different fragments of the story as they browsed.
Results were driven by a strategically revealed teaser film and then the ultimate bombastic reveal film. Again further impacted by the spin-off sequence films for all those that wanted more.
APPROACH
We pitched EA a creative concept that fused three key elements — high octane fashion conscious street football combined with colour and design VFX — blurring the boundaries between worlds.
IMPACT
An insane amount of hype and speculation that drove FIFA’s loyal fanbase and beyond into a frenzy: 13.12M Views, 819.3K Likes, 17K Retweets, 37.7K Comments and 11.3K Shares
