We partnered with FIFA and the Canadian Soccer Association to work for the 2015 Women’s World Cup. Hosted in our hometown of Vancouver BC amongst other Canadian cities, we had the opportunity to create the FIFA animations for the stadiums’ banners (nationwide). We had 3 months to complete this project, which would be watched by hundreds of thousands, live in stadiums and on TV.
The reps at FIFA were heavily involved in every step of the process, and their expectations were high (as you would for a worldwide event). The animated visuals had to be subtle (non-distracting) yet eye-catching. These animations consisted on a series of loops running throughout every game and played on 3 different stadiums across Canada. A total of 35 loops were created for the duration of the event. Along with the regular loops, we also created an additional 15 videos for the championship celebration.
Every project has roadblocks. Whether they are technical challenges or miscommunications, there is usually some sort of issue that needs to be resolved. At the beginning, when we initially pitched our ideas to FIFA, they weren’t really clear on the type of banners they needed. As an international organization, they’re very strict about their branding and they were concerned an animated banner would be too distracting – so the alternative we discussed was to cover the stadium’s LED banners with printed canvases. We had to work together to come to a conclusion, and share that a fascia banner animation was the best fit for this project. Which was never done for a World Cup before.
As a studio, our experience creating animations for 360 degree fascia banners in stadiums was… zero. So we teamed up with the stadium’s audio-visual (AV) department to test, adapt and apply our visual assets to such long canvases.
Because there is no screen in the world that could give us such a format to perform test-runs, we had to create a series of videos to trim into 4 separate pieces. And even so, we ran into timing issues due to the amount of animations we had to test at the beginning.
What could’ve been a huge disaster, ended up being a small hiccup. Someone mistakenly launched the animations that were pre-made for the predicted winning team before the final game was over. Meaning the possible World Cup Championship winners were announced during the game. Luckily, said team was already winning 5-1, so the outcome matched what was shown on the banners. Phew!
Working with FIFA was the highlight of that year. We proved that our small team can handle world-class events on extremely strict deadlines and very high expectations. We came into this project with no experience and we’re proud to have come out of it successfully on the other side.
But next time we take part on a similar project, we’ll make sure to hire more help…
CATEGORY
Immersive Experience
CLIENT
FIFA
GENRE
LED Banners
