How They Filmed the FIFA World Cup 2026 Promo in 90 Days

Producing the content campaign for an event the size of the World Cup means moving fast across many cities at once, with multiple crews shooting in parallel. When award-winning line producer Bryan Fellows took on the FIFA World Cup campaign series, the job was a single 90-day production across 16 cities, and he ran every dollar of it on Saturation, without ever opening a spreadsheet.

Fellows is a freelance line producer whose career spans roughly 60 countries across live television, commercials, documentaries, and music videos, and his team was tasked with producing all the content for the FIFA World Cup campaign series. It was the kind of assignment that breaks traditional production accounting: dozens of vendors, per diems, travel, and card spend hitting in parallel across crews and cities, with no easy way to know the live number until weeks of post-shoot reconciliation.

We tracked 90 days of production expenses without ever opening a spreadsheet. That was unthinkable before Saturation.
Bryan Fellows, line producer

The Brief: A Promo Campaign the Size of a Continent

Commercial production moves fast, and a campaign tied to the world's biggest sporting event moves faster. "When it comes to producing, especially in the commercial sphere, which is what I do day in and day out, we have to turn things around so fast," Fellows says. The job was a single 90-day production spanning 16 cities across the United States, Canada, and Mexico, with multiple crews shooting simultaneously. Every crew was spending at once, in different markets, on different cards, and the producer was accountable for the live number the entire time.

How do you budget a 90-day, 16-city production?

Rather than force the shoot into a rigid city-by-city ledger, Fellows organized expenses by trip, mirroring how the production actually moved. "We're combining by trip instead of by city," he explains. "That production team actually went to both of those cities, and that was like one encapsulated trip." It is a small reframe with a big payoff: on travel-heavy shoots, one leg often covers two markets and gear moves between them, so a trip, not an arbitrary city boundary, is the natural unit of cost. Saturation lets a producer structure the budget that way instead of fighting the software.

How did the team track spending across simultaneous crews?

Two mechanisms did the heavy lifting. First, tag-based filtering for instant visibility: each trip and market carried its own tag, so Fellows could click a single tag and see only those line items. "I can select a tag here, only the line items that are referring to that tag are going to show up. That's really helpful," he says. With one click he could pull up the running total for the LA and San Francisco trip, with no formulas and no hunting through tabs. Second, real-time credit-card sync: "The production company has credit cards that are synced through Plaid into Saturation," Fellows says, so spend from every crew flowed into the budget as it happened. "Sometimes we are in multiple different cities at the same time," he adds, "and we are able to quickly see which card and the different transactions related to it, then attach a receipt very easily, pulled directly from that transaction." Instead of reconciling weeks after wrap, he had live actuals while the cameras were still rolling.

Why trip-based budgeting beats spreadsheets for multi-city shoots

Spreadsheets break down on exactly this kind of production. They require manual reconciliation, they cannot show live actuals, and they force a false city-by-city structure onto a shoot that does not move that way. Trip grouping, tag filters, and automatic production-card sync replace all of that with real-time control: one source of truth, updated as money is spent, filterable to any trip in a click. Pair that with bill pay and approvals in the same place, and the reconciliation marathon that usually follows a big campaign simply does not happen. He went further than tracking, too: vendors were paid directly from Saturation with ACH payments tied to each purchase order, and payroll flowed in from Wrapbook through a built-in integration. "It is kind of like a one-stop shop for everything," Fellows says, "versus us using multiple programs." As he puts it, tracking 90 days without a spreadsheet was unthinkable before Saturation.

Key Takeaways

• Major live events like the FIFA World Cup drive multi-city, multi-crew content production at a scale that strains traditional budgeting.
• Line producer Bryan Fellows produced the promotional campaign as a single 90-day shoot across 16 North American cities, with multiple crews running at once.
• He organized expenses by trip, not city by city, mirroring how the production actually moved between markets.
• Tag-based filtering gave instant per-trip totals: one tag surfaced an entire trip’s spend in a single click.
• Real-time credit-card sync via Plaid fed live spend from every crew into the budget, replacing weeks of post-shoot reconciliation with live actuals.
• He tracked all 90 days of production expenses without ever opening a spreadsheet, which he calls unthinkable before Saturation.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who produced the FIFA World Cup promotional content?

Bryan Fellows, an award-winning freelance line producer whose career spans roughly 60 countries across live television, commercials, documentaries, and music videos, served as producer on all promotional content for the FIFA World Cup campaign series. He ran the production's finances on Saturation. This is promotional-campaign work by an independent producer, and Saturation is not affiliated with or endorsed by FIFA.

How was the FIFA World Cup campaign filmed across 16 cities in 90 days?

Bryan Fellows ran a single 90-day production spanning 16 cities across North America, coordinating multiple crews shooting simultaneously. He organized expenses by trip rather than city by city, used tag-based filtering for instant per-trip budget visibility, and relied on real-time credit-card sync to keep the budget current as the shoot moved across markets.

How do you track production expenses across multiple cities and crews at once?

Group spending by trip rather than rigid city by city, then use tag-based filtering to surface any trip's total instantly. On the FIFA World Cup campaign, one tag surfaced an entire trip’s total at a single click. Real-time credit-card sync via Plaid fed spend from multiple simultaneous crews into the budget as it happened, giving live actuals instead of post-shoot reconciliation.

Can you run a major production budget without spreadsheets?

Yes. Bryan Fellows tracked 90 days of FIFA World Cup campaign expenses without ever opening a spreadsheet, using Saturation's trip grouping, tag filters, and real-time card sync. In his words: "We tracked 90 days of production expenses without ever opening a spreadsheet. That was unthinkable before Saturation."

What does a line producer do on a large promotional campaign?

A line producer owns the logistics and budget of a shoot: scheduling, crews, locations, vendors, and expense tracking. On the FIFA World Cup campaign, that meant keeping a 90-day, 16-city, multi-crew production on budget in real time across the United States, Canada, and Mexico.

How do you get real-time budget visibility while production is still shooting?

Real-time credit-card sync feeds spend into the budget as it happens, and tag-based filtering surfaces any trip's total instantly. That gives the producer live numbers across all active crews, rather than waiting for a post-shoot reconciliation, which is how Bryan Fellows kept the FIFA World Cup campaign production on track.

Run your next multi-city production on Saturation

Whether it is a national commercial tour, a multi-market campaign, or a 16-city documentary, Saturation gives you live budget actuals across every crew, trip-based organization, and real-time card sync, so you always know the number while you are still shooting. Start free, or explore more customer stories and pricing.

Saturation is not affiliated with or endorsed by FIFA. This is one independent producer's account of running his own productions on the platform.