2025 Schedule Release: Minecraft Edition

The NFL schedule release has become its own tentpole event across social and digital spaces in recent years. Teams increasingly buy in with engaging campaigns to capture the attention of fans, build up excitement, and most importantly, convert ticket sales. The Chargers make it a point to lead the league in creating engaging schedule releases that reach not just its own fanbase, but have something for fans across the league and for those outside of the NFL bubble, often drawing inspiration on culture touchstones outside of sports (anime, video games, etc).

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Ideation

Through our weekly brainstorming sessions in early 2025, one idea kept resurfacing- Minecraft. The previous year, we used Sims 2 as our canvas with the help of mods and custom content. With that experience, we learned video games were a great medium for creativity, but would be limited by the amount of support for customizability and modification. While Sims 2 brought that key feeling of nostalgia and a unique medium for a pro football team, there were some difficulties in making a nearly 20 year game work in the ways we wanted to. Minecraft, however, had less of these hurdles. With broad appeal, easy access, and a highly anticipated movie coming out, Minecraft became a top contender for our 2025 schedule release.

Planning and Research

We (Jaemin Cho, Hannah Johnson, Thomas Jens, and I) had previously made a Minecraft-style video as a short-form hype video for a game in the 2024, so several of us already had a taste of what the process may look like. However, for the execution of a longer, cinemtatic, and intentional video, we needed to dive deeper into the game's limitations and what could be possible with the help of mods.

Building on the experience from that video, we took a hard look at how we could achieve the cinematic look of other Minecraft videos posted on the internet and how we could adapt that into our schedule release. I drafted up a research document and we filmed a test scene on a temporary server to present to the larger department. After seeing the flexibilty of the game and plethora of mods avilable, we committed to the idea and started crafting.

Execution

Within our department, we had 6 who had Minecraft accounts and were able to help build out the assets needed for every scene: Jaemin Cho, Hannah Johnson, Michael Gonzalez, Will Hahn, Luke Kohli, and myself.

Led by David Bretto, we'd meet regularly as a larger department to workshop scenes, ideas, and easter eggs, referencing a "burn book" that included lists of possible jokes for every team on our schedule. Megan Julian and Allie Raymond were also very involved in helping write out these jokes and scenes to make sure they'd resonate on social. Once we've hammered out a scene and a loose shot list, we'd get to work on building out the scene. Tasks were delegated to those with different skillsets- some were natural builders, others could re-texture skins, and so on. Once our scene was built, textures created, and shots planned out, we'd start filming. Filming could involve only 2 people or up to 6, depending on the complexity of the scene. Here, David was instrumental in directing the scenes and camera movements to get the most cinematic look possible. I would also help prep the scenes and direct filming, especially later in the process.

A vital piece of the puzzle was one particular mod called Flashback. It's not an understatement to say that this mod was a game changer (pun intended, I'm so sorry). Flashback allowed us to capture the gameplay of our scenes, open that recording and then manipulate the camera, lighting, textures, and more post-action to get the exact movements we wanted. It saved us time whenever we needed to re-texture or re-skin, since we could simply do that in the replay instead of having to re-film the entire scene. The replay viewer included a timeline with many features of a typical NLE (including eased keyframes 🤯).

The Edit

Once all the scenes were filmed and shots exported from Flashback, I organized the footage in Premiere Pro. Keeping one of our core pillars in mind, these scenes had to be permutable, meaning that they could appear in any order since we would not have exact schedule of opponents until the day or two prior to the public release. Additionally, keeping the pace quick was just as important, utilizing camera movements and sound to keep the audience engaged for each scene. The amount of easter egg jokes sprinkled in the background of each scene also ensured viewers would have to go back and rewatch the video several times to get most of the jokes.

Important to note is that through this entire process we are constantly sending scenes for notes and approval, between our content department, internal PR team, and Mojang/Microsft.

An essential part of the edit was the graphical elements and sound effects. For the graphics, I would often take screenshots of the UI in-game and recreate those in Photoshop as an easy way to emulate the feeling of the game. These elements incuded buttons, achievements, hotbars, and menus.

Getting the native sounds of the game posed to be more challenging. I was able to extract the hundreds of .ogg sound files from the .jar game file; however, Premiere and Media Encoder were unable to properly read that particular file type. After some research, I concluded the best way to re-encode everything was to iterate through a large folder tree of audio files and use a Python script that utilized FFMPEG. This took me down a rabbit hole of Stack Overflow forums, Google searches, and vibecoding, but in the end, we had a library of .mp3 audio files that were native to the game and quick to import to our scenes. (Thank you CompSci minor)

Once the schedule arrived, it was a race to quickly arranged our scenes and polish any rough edges. We combed through the timeline for any mistakes. Once we were happy with the video, we picturelocked and I started resizing for different social channels. After everything was sent to publish, the only thing left was to sit back and watch the flood of schedule release videos from the rest of the league.