Case study · Esports World Cup · with Havas Dubai
Fifteen cities. Fifteen tribes. One launch.
A previz-driven takeover system that gave the inaugural Esports World Cup a hometown headline in every gaming capital on earth — delivered on an early build of PREVIZ, in close collaboration with Havas and ECD Leo Rosa Borges.
The challenge
Launch a first-of-its-kind global tournament to an audience of 3.2 billion players splintered across genres, publishers, and cultures — without flattening any of them. Fifteen cities, fifteen communities, one campaign, one deadline.
The PREVIZ approach
AIM ran an early build of PREVIZ as the campaign's virtual scouting department, working shoulder to shoulder with Havas and ECD Leo Rosa Borges. Each city takeover was blocked and lit as a cinematic sequence — the Counter-Strike chicken on a Cologne bridge, the CN Tower as an Overwatch dragon — before a single plate was shot. Live action, photogrammetry, Unreal, Houdini, and the generative stack then matched what had already been approved.
Outcomes
04
500M
Total viewers
Campaign-reported reach across broadcast and social.
15
City takeovers, one register
Every city blocked in PREVIZ so fifteen accents read as one campaign.
122M+
Views across assets
Campaign-reported, across vertical social, OOH, broadcast, and press.
$28.4M
Earned media value
Campaign-reported EMV — Reuters, CNN, IGN, Arab News, and publisher channels.
01
Scouting fifteen cities without leaving the room
You cannot location-scout Cologne, Shenzhen, Rio, Toronto, and Munich on a launch-campaign clock. PREVIZ made the scout virtual: each city's icon, each game's inside reference, each camera move existed as an approved cinematic frame before production committed to plates, photogrammetry, or CG build.
That is what let fifteen wildly different communities — Counter-Strike to Honor of Kings to Free Fire — share one visual register without a single tribe feeling translated.
02
One pipeline, fifteen accents
Live-action plates, Unreal, Houdini, and the generative pipeline were composited into a single register — but the sequencing was PREVIZ-first, so every downstream discipline was executing a locked frame rather than negotiating one. Iteration happened where it is cheap: in previz, not on set.
03
The headlines followed
Reuters, CNN, IGN, Arab News, and the publishers themselves amplified the takeovers inside their own communities. 500 million total viewers, two million attendees, 122M+ views across assets, and $28.4M in earned media value. The campaign also produced a PREVIZ-born concept extension: the tournament identity rendered at Las Vegas Sphere scale.
From the file
“Fifteen cities approved as cinematic frames before a single plate was shot. The scout was virtual; the headlines were not.”
— AIM · Esports World Cup production notes — early PREVIZ build
The work
03
AIM PREVIZ
Bring PREVIZ to your next production.
Sign off on motion, not moodboards. Blocking, look-dev, and continuity locked before a single frame is shot.