EA Sports came to us with a clear goal - take the real players into the game world using HyperMotion and make it fun. So we did! Working directly with the in-house EA team, we sweated the concept to create an overblown ‘Hollywood’ style film that knowingly riffs off everything from The Matrix to Independence Day. At Private Island, we develop by building a load of animatic moments on a timeline to understand pacing. That eventually gave us a bulletproof three-act ensemble structure that could survive the twists and turns of changing talent and locations The spot is about blurred realities - taking the players we all know alongside the whole carnival of football and wrapping it up in the game world. Sports games are unique in that your protagonist isn’t a Space Marine or…an elf! Instead, it’s your favourite player from your team. That connection is integral to the experience and what we want to bring to life. The joy of this spot was that the concept allows for the HyperMotion game footage and real-world to be brought together organically — something that’s quite rare for games trailers and it meant we didn’t have to jam a brand message into it retroactively. The film is split into two worlds, one is the real world which we inhabit, the other is the ‘game’ world, which the game characters inhabit. The fun with the spot was taking characters and placing them in the wrong world. Kind of like Space Jam meets Roger Rabbit, who crashes into The Lawnmower Man and ends up in The Matrix. There was a real advantage working in tandem with the guys in VFX and having the chance to see very early storyboards, weeks before anything was even shot. This then progressed through to early visual portal tests and being able to create a pallet of sounds to use once everything was rendered. Because of the length of the full version, we could break it up scene by scene and piece the whole thing together in the final stages.