Our objective was to create cultural awareness, hype and excitement ahead of Camila Cabello's opening ceremony performance at the UEFA Champions League Final in Paris, beyond just football fans who would tune in anyway.
The idea that drove the work was all about creating premium vertical video for channels like TikTok and Instagram Reels that showed that, with the right direction, idea and execution not all successful videos need to be captured in low-fi ways on phones by creators. There is space for premium, highly commercial craft if the campaign content is devised for vertical social feeds from the start.
This project is one of the most ambitious and innovative films we’ve ever shot for social: A spectacular vertical video to announce a spectacular event – Camila Cabello’s opening show at the UEFA Champions League final in Paris.
Despite being the world’s greatest passion, football is still an exclusive space. So we brought Camila Cabello's Latin cultural heritage to the pitch with a transformative visual feast designed primarily for TikTok and Instagram Reels. To excite and drive awareness with Camila fans and music culture fans beyond just football fans who will tune in for the final anyway.
The reveal film was captured by a one-of-kind custom drone with a vertically mounted cinema camera shot on a 150-metre Hollywood green stage. This allowed We Are Social Studios to create a magical 3D world in post-production that infused Camila’s vibrant, fiesta world with the festival energy of football that comes to life during passionate UEFA Champions League final nights.
We structured the story of the video around an enhanced magic outfit transition - taking what's popular online on TikTok and elevating it using the full might of commercial production technology.
The journey towards the shoot raised numerous challenges. Camilas's performance and interaction with the drone were at the heart of the whole thing so we worked closely with her choreography team remotely in L.A. ahead of the shoot. It was also important to walk the line between the presence of Pepsi and UEFA branding while being authentic to Camila's world so her fans would embrace the content and love and share it. We did this by naturally inserting Pepsi brand iconography and just the right amount of football visuals with a fiesta feeling.
When working with the first drone of its kind. The main issue was overheating and incredibly short flight times as the drone really drank up the batteries. Coupled with a short shooting window that comes with shooting massive A-List talent. We’d worked out a really tight pre-vis to sync the camera move with the choreography so fortunately it didn’t take long for our drone pilots to have mastered it, but we still had a preciously small number of attempts at getting everything all together.
This is a totally new, unique approach to creating premium, impactful and irresistibly sharable vertical social content. We combined a ‘one shot’ swooping drone movement with A-lister choreography and epic post-production compositing to create a visual feast that was truly embraced, loved and shared by Camila’s true fans, broader music culture lovers and football fans alike.
Beyond the main opening ceremony promo video the campaign also featured teaser vertical content before Camila was officially announced, a TikTok dance competition that got fans sharing their moves to Camila’s new track Bam Bam’ and a TikTok LIVE preview show ahead of the actual performance hosted by a range of football and entertainment TikTok creators captured on the ground in Paris.
The collection of vertical campaign video content gained over 250 million views and 3 million likes across TikTok, Instagram and Facebook combined.
The main vertical campaign video on Camila's TikTok alone has 97 million views, 2 million likes and 10000 comments making it the most engaged piece of content out of all her own TikTok content even though it’s branded!
The combined impact of the campaign resulted in over 2 million people tuning in to watch the opening ceremony show broadcast on TikTok LIVE on the night.
Our campaign resulted in the most successful branded TikTok LIVE ever. Now used as a best-in-class case study by TikTok to demonstrate how to drive massive awareness, hype and excitement around a TikTok live branded moment with vertical video.
