FA Cup Anniversary Documentary

Client: Leicester City Football Club
Project: History Makers – LCFC

To celebrate the first anniversary of Leicester City Football Club’s FA cup triumph, the club asked us to produce a feature-length documentary that could be played out across the club’s various online and owned media channels. Although LCFC has a long and interesting history with the FA Cup, the club were keen to not dwell on the past too much, but instead, look to apply a contemporary approach and feel to the narrative, concentrating primarily on the day of the Cup Final itself, and capturing this unique event from the perspectives of both the fans and the players. The key hook to the film was to try and move beyond the usual, media-trained sports interviews and collect real insight from the contributors as to how they felt on the big day. 

It was important that with such a potentially large audience for the video, the footage and content reflected the brand’s own high video production values across its various media outputs. To that end, Slate and Mortar utilised a Director of Photography from the get-go, to design and develop a lighting and framing set-up that could be used by a variety of camera operators across multiple days. Shot with prime lenses, steady-cam and some unique lighting rigs, the footage speaks for itself. Filming took place across three days in February and involved travel across the city, collecting interviews at the training ground and throughout the stadium.  

The narrative edit was a collaborative effort between the LCFC internal video team and Slate and Mortar, who provided LCFC with an on-site consultant to develop the story and structure the film. With huge amounts of footage to review, and an intended duration of one hour, this had the potential to be a very long process, but the utilisation of interview transcripts, paper edits, and plenty of coffee, kept things moving along nicely. 

Online edit, audio mixing and colour grade were completed in-house by the Slate and Mortar post-production team, all ready for the film’s release which coincided with the week of the 2022 FA Cup Final.