World of Warships: Earn Your Greatness

When the Washington Capitals became the Stanley Cup champions in 2018, the gaming developer Wargaming jumped on the opportunity to sign Capitals winger Alex Ovechkin to a deal.

It may seem odd to link a successful hockey player to a game like World of Warships, but Wargaming hoped to make a connection between an athletic achievement and World of Warships by showing that repetition and practice were essential elements for success.

Wargaming partnered with our video production company on a campaign.

The film brought the endorsement deal with Alex Ovechkin to fruition by marrying the gaming and sports worlds in an anthemic way.

Wargaming sought to communicate the connection between World of Warships and pro hockey: both require skill, intense practice, repetition of actions, and the necessity to learn by failing.

Our mission was to show the emotional aspect of an arduous journey while also visually conveying the art of practicing.

Our goal was for viewers to see the film and feel compelled to work on themselves and improve in whatever way they could. This was the fuel behind “Earn Your Greatness”.

When we began to dive into both World of Warships and hockey, we discovered more similarities than was obvious at first: both occurred on water and consisted of launching objects over that water; and they both were highly intense and fast-paced.

Creatively, we found that we could blur the lines that formed these two worlds. A sea that is transformed out of ice; a missile that begins as a hockey puck, and so on.

The protagonist is someone trying to achieve something great and the journey that encompasses that, from the initial phase all the way through failing and eventually coming out on the other side.

PC Gamer called “Earn Your Greatness” amazing and one of the most successful examples of a celebrity endorsement the industry had seen. The film was used to promote the update of World of Warships in the fall of 2018.

It was our honor to receive an ADDY award in the field of Sound Design from the American Advertising Federation.

Artex – our Los Angeles-based video production company – was responsible for the conceptualization, scripting, treatment, production, and post-production for this project.