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Creative production company We Are Royale (WAR) recently created an anthem video to hype up audiences for VALORANT First Strike: North America, a four-day, cut-throat tournament produced by Riot Games. On December 3rd, the continent's top eight teams went head to head for a piece of the $100,000 prize pool and the title of North America’s first VALORANT champion, with 100 Thieves emerging as the best team after three fierce and highly competitive matches.

WAR produced the hyper-visual anthem building off Riot’s recent “That New Fire” campaign. Asking “Who Will Rise?”, the sixty-second video features a brash pool of VALORANT gamers who are hellbent on victory, with abstract footage, distorted fire elements, and kinetic typography to underscore their fiery player personalities.

Working closely with Riot Games, WAR anchored the visual system for the video in analogue elements like hand-drawn illustrations and scanned typographic materials. The team then fed these elements into an array of digital distortions and effects, incorporating digital techniques along the way – from CG simulation to photoreal 3D and 2D design. The all-out effort saw WAR bringing together artists across three time zones and two continents. 

“The process we took allowed for our team to have an exceptional level of control over each scene, which was especially helpful considering all of the footage, players and teams were subject to last-minute changes since the tournament qualifiers began a few weeks before we delivered,” says Eric Del Greco, creative director at We Are Royale.

An electric hip-hop track by Ape Drums steers the frenetic edit, mixing in up-to-the-minute tournament shots and reactions. Here, WAR developed a VFX fire-simulation to elevate the story beats and push the “new fire” narrative even further.