F1 24 Reveal Trailer

For this years F1 reveal trailer I was tasked with ideation and selling in the idea to stakeholders before handing it off to an external editor to finish when I was taking my son back to the motherland for the first time.

With limited creative briefs, myself and Elliott Harrison took the edit by the horns and produced a ripo that alined with what brand was focusing on this year.

We came up with a bold execution idea which focused on mixing real world footage with capture as well as incorporating a live shoot with our cover athlete: Max Verstappen. For this we had camera operators shooting in the garages & paddock during the Bahrain race weekend and a shoot was setup separately when Max was available between races. For this we had to get our motion toolkit and graphics rendered well ahead of time as we actually wanted them on an LED screen behind him to light him in the space. We used external vendors for this but the majority was produced by Chapter 3 from the UK.

I handed off the edit to the creative team who where going to drive the live shoot and direct the external editor from here on.

A month later I returned Vancouver and was drafted in to take charge of the edit once again as it was off track and at risk of not being ready for our reveal date. I then discovered that the team hadn’t actually got the music tracked signed off with the relevant parties so when they stood their ground and said they weren’t happy with the direction it was going I had to come up with different options and re-edit the trailer.

We had just a week left of production time and we had 2 edits being produced in simultaneously to ensure we would have something ready in time. This was obviously a huge lift and a far from ideal way of working, but with no time left we had to take charge and get it over the line. The team finally landed on the Greenday track as the final one so this is what we worked up to go live.

This trailer ended up being more about the learnings we took away from it rather than the product itself in my opinion. The trailer worked well in the end, but it should never have been the headache it was. There are a lot of people to thank to get it done and actually have something to show and hopefully future reveals will learn from this one.

A huge thanks to our internal capture team for their efforts on this while everything was constantly changing. We brought on Niche VFX from last year to help raise the visual fidelity of all the shots and lastly Source Sound who did a monumental job working up not one, but two edits to pretty much final before the team decided which way we were going to go. This should never have happened this way but it’s great to partner up with such pro’s that they could take that in their stride.