“We’re trying to save people’s lives, improve people’s lives, create equality. All of this is. significantly more important than any sport.”
Undeniable: The Story of Black Players for Change is a documentary on a group of professional soccer players devoted to creating meaningful change within Major League Soccer, and the larger soccer community.
Currently, Undeniable is in production, with principal interviews expected to be completed in late August of 2022, with post production completed before the end of 2023.
As Undeniable started as my undergraduate thesis, I serve in a variety of roles across the project. Of particular note, I serve as the projects Producer, Director, and Social Media lead.
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Design
Creating a strong visual identity for Undeniable was key to attracting the attention of the soccer community, and immediately making the project recognizable as affiliated with Black Players for Change.
Working with several other talented designers, we created a bold and simplistic identity that can be found across our project, from our social media presence to our physical merchandise.
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Social Media
As a documentary film that relies 100% on donations to fund our project, having an engaging and active online presence is critical to our success.
As social media lead, I work with our team to guide, and create web content including graphics and copy, and handle all of our interactions with followers and customers.
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Film
At its core, Undeniable is a documentary film about a subject that’s unspeakably important to me, racial equality. It’s for that reason that I threw myself headlong into my undergraduate thesis and developed it into the feature length project that has become Undeniable.
On the film side of things, I serve as the Director and Producer. I handle all communication with our athletes, and split the responsibilities of scheduling shoots, booking locations, and managing our budget. In addition, as director I conduct all interviews, and play a role in determining the visual direction of the project.
“BPC is Undeniably here to stay.”
After our first two trips to interview subjects in March, and May of 2021, our crew cut our first teaser trailer. The trailer served as a proof of concept to show both the members of BPC, and our future financial backers what our vision was for the project.
Design work
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Undeniable’s branding is sleek, unafraid, and, well… Undeniable. The whole idea behind the brand was that it needed to be simple to understand, and easy to identify. We wanted to create a visual identity that immediately let people know what our project was about, and immediately understand its ties to Black Players for Change.
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I would be lying if I said I didn’t immediately see the opportunity for me to fulfill one of my life long dreams within the scope of this project. The dream? Creating my very own soccer jersey.
Working with the design team over at Icarus FC, I worked to create a jersey that mirrored the bold nature of BPC and its members. A jersey that felt like it paid homage to both the gorgeous shirts of the beautiful games history, and the retro-modern streetwear scene that’s so lovingly adopted soccer jerseys in recent years. A shirt that looked euqally at home on the pitch, in the stands, and on the street.
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Scarfs were our very first crowd funding perk, and as such, went through more than a few variations before we started getting them out the door.
Despite the changes however, at the core we always knew the scarf needed to instantly represent all our project stood for. For that reason, we kept the design simple, and settled on using the same graphics from our social media and crowdfunding campaigns. Currently, we’re working on manufacturing scarfs in club specific colors as special thank you’s to supporters groups that have been especially generous in their support of our project.
