Ben Chilwell Signing Video

Super Secret Animation

The great thing about working on this signing video for Ben Chilwell is we got to find out who Chelsea FC were going to sign about a week before it happened. For every big, secret announcement there are a whole host of people who need to know the info beforehand, usually under NDA! Someone’s gotta get the initials ‘BC’ stitched into his training gear and we have to prepare the signing video graphics.

On the day

On the day of signing it’s a mad rush. Ben turns up at Chelsea’s training facility in the morning of the signing day to get his kit on and then goes straight to the green screen studio.  CFC’s media crew get some stills shot and also some video content for us.

We get our mitts on that footage about 3pm and then have about 3 hours to process that footage, remove the green screen, quickly grade and drop into our pre prepared video. So at around 6pm Chelsea officially announce the signing and bombard social media channels with all the hype content they’ve got prepared, this vid included.

The campaign went to plan with around a million twitter views in the first 24 hours.

The Train Carriage

The train idea was thought up by the guys at CFC – using archive footage in the advertising display LEDs. Ben Chilwell’s nickname is ‘Chilly’ so we used that a theme bringing an icy feel into the carriage.

The carriage scene itself was built in Cinema 4D adapted from an online model. As much as we’d like to spend 5 days modelling a train carriage there simply wasn’t the time available. Everything was rendered in a hyper real, metallic style using Octane render. Icy blue neon theme throughout for extra chill.

The Animation

After we blast through the icy doors the rest of the graphics are setup with speed in mind. We use test green screen footage as placeholder know that once we get the footage from CFC it’s going to slot straight in.

Finally, plenty of easter eggs to be had. All of the archive footage is of legendary CFC left backs. There’s also some subliminal one frame moments in there. Something the twitter fraternity cottoned onto which is nice.

Client – Chelsea FC