The film shows a never-before-seen compilation of actions from players of the French football national men's team. For the 1st minute, the play of Mbappé, Giroud, Griezmann... is displayed, in a sequence that borrows from the codes of best-of-sports videos, with a fast-paced editing and adrenaline-inducing soundtrack.

The reveal unveils the ruse: the video is in fact a compilation of women’s technical moves. Thanks to VFX, the appearance of the woman's team has been faked in the 1st part of the compilation, to serve our message about their skills. These beautiful actions, without VFX, are replayed in the 2nd part of the video, so the audience can admire them, stripped away from the filter of their stereotypes.

Our idea relied entirely on the craft of this visual trick. Without craft, the illusion wouldn’t have been perfect, and wouldn’t have provoked the intended effect on our audience.

This summer, the French women's football team played in its 5th World Cup, in a unique context. Up until a few weeks before the competition, no media organization had stepped in to buy the broadcasting rights for the event.

In a country where football is a passion, women's football is left out of the fervor. One of the reasons is prejudice about its lack of technical skills. Many fans have a strong opinion about it, without ever having watched a match, or having looked at biased compilations ("The worst of women's football", "100% fails women's football”…)

This is why the WWC was a key moment for Orange, a committed partner of football for 24 years, to go beyond its usual support for the French Women's Team, via a CSR brief whose main objective was to tackle the prejudices that women's football suffers from.

In France, football is king, with a popularity that has been fueled by the succeses of the men’s national team : 2-times world champion, finalist of the last edition in 2022. But women's football is left our of the fervor, partly because it’s still a relatively young sport, only being officially recognized by the FFF in 1974. This 2023 Women’s Wold Cup was only the 9th edition, whereas it was the 22nd for the men’s. But this doesn’t mean the women’s team’s drive is less than the men’s : they have been #5 in the FIFA ranking for years, have reached the semi-final during the last Euro…

Before the WWC, the French should have been cheering for their determined team. Yet, 3 weeks before its start, no TV partner had agreed to cover it. This was a painful reminder of the lack of institutional support to the sport in France, while other countries have succeeded in bridging the gender inequalities in football, by investing. In this panorama, it was important for brand sponsors such as Orange to step in.

For Orange, the leading telecommunication company, as a former state-owned company, public service is a core value. It is one of the first French brands to provide extensive support for football, with a trackrecord of 24 years backing amateur, professional,women and men’s football. Since 2018, the brand has held the status of a Major Partner of the French Football Federation, supporting both the Men's and Women's National Teams with equal resources.

The production of the video was achieved manually by a team of 15 VFX specialists, over the course of two months. Step 1 was digging into hours of footage from football matches, and finding women and men’s action with strong visual resemblance. This step alone took two weeks.

The rest of the work was hundreds of hours of meticulous flame, to mix and match men’s heads on women, warp their proportions to make them match their male “action twin”, adjust their skin tones, change their jerseys, going as far as to add the two gold stars for the men’s... After the “male” players were credible, the final part was going into secondary players: since the devil is in the details, erasing every feminine cue from them was key for our compilation to be credible. Until the last day, details that might ruin the ruse were slowly erased.