Soccer is Life –Associate Producer on Fan-Generated Content Covering 2018 FIFA World Cup Russia for Telemundo Deportes

2018 has been quite an exciting year. It started with the culmination of two great projects, the film screening in Ecuador of the documentary DreamTown and the branded multimedia project for my client EmmaArakelyan, a former partner of EY and managing director at Accenture. I’ll share more on Arakelyan on an upcoming post and podcast, scheduled for release in early January.

Then in June came the exhilarating opportunity to work on a project covering several Latin American games of the 2018 FIFA World Cup Russia, produced by COPA90 for Telemundo Deportes.

Using handy smartphones, Latin American soccer fans(Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Mexico, Panama, Peru) living in the USA captured the spirit of soccer as they anxiously watched their team’s players sweat on the field for the extraordinary chance at scoring their way to the finals.  

As the project’s associate producer, I worked closely with the account manager/producer to ensure we delivered a final edit of the game to Telemundoon the same day.

Working remotely, from Copa90’s Wall Street office, with fan creators in NYC, Los Angeles, Lima, Miami and other locations meant walking them through shots lists, location setups and game themes pertaining to each country’s team they needed to record. Content creators had just a little over two hours to record, many times re-recording, their 60-second intros, game highlights and interaction with other fans – friends, family and strangers sharing the love of the sport –either at their homes or restaurants.

This meant sending out individual content requests to each soccerfan content creator, tracking each video clip submission, managing quality assurance– lighting, sound, content. “Did we capture all the main points and are they conveyed clearly?”

Once video clips were delivered and organized according to our workflow, I’d arrange them quickly in a basic paper edit for our editor. He had to turn around the final edit in just a few hours. Yes, there was teamwork on the field and at Copa90.

Here is Copa90’s compilation video including our content. It was an incredible experience to work on another soccer-related production. After all, soccer is life around the world. It brought me a new set of skills and experiences while working with user-generated content, which is growing fast in sports marketing, helping brands with strategic social media placement for audience engagement and participitation.