Heineken & Major League Soccer - The Invisible Thread

Background

I was working as a staff video editor at Juice Groove Films when an assignment came across our desk that seemed like a dream come true: a broadcast TV commercial for Heineken and Major League Soccer. It wasn't until the ink on the contract dried that I realised what I was getting myself into.

The brief: capture live footage of fans, players, coaches, and MLS personalities wearing different green shirts with seemingly random words on them. Then, right before the MLS playoffs, premiere a commercial with all of those words stitched together into a love letter to the beautiful game.

In basic numbers: 137 words. 11 MLS teams. 6 TV networks. Nearly 500 soccer fans and actors.

In practice, the three-person team at Juice Groove had to print nearly 3,000 t-shirts to distribute to selected fans at 8 different MLS games. After signing releases and confirming seat locations, Juice Groove's camera crew captured fans wearing their shirts in the wild using specialised telephoto lenses and fast reflexes.

For the Heineken product shots there was an additional staged shoot at a local supporters' bar, where loyal NYCFC fans gathered on our closed set. They were compensated with an open bar tab that climbed to an eye-watering five-figure bill.

At the end of the two-month shoot I had nearly 20 TB of clips. It was time to get to editing.

How I helped

Working closely with Juice Groove and two creative directors from Publicis, I cut the commercial in Adobe Premiere Pro. Each word in the sentence might have been captured eight different times, in different places, on different people, so there were a myriad of edit decisions to make. Organisation was the whole job — we pushed Google Sheets to its limits with columns of actors, release documents, and photo references.

After a week we submitted our first locked cut. Then Heineken's legal department came back with bad news: the hashtag printed as a subtitle on every shirt was a possible copyright violation and had to go. The only way to do that was manually scrubbing the text out of 137 different shots. Teaming up with a few contracted VFX artists, we rotoscoped all 137 within three days. I also completed a handful of VFX shots in After Effects, including screen replacements, motion tracking, and rotoscoping.

The results

The campaign was an instant success. Before the commercial aired, thousands of tweets appeared questioning the meaning of the mysterious green shirts, boosting Heineken's social engagement by nearly double.

The commercial itself ran throughout the 2017 MLS Championship matches and netted an additional 2.5 million views on YouTube. International soccer legend and NYCFC captain David Villa retweeted the campaign to his 8.8 million followers.