AFC Asian Cup 2023: Ceremony & Activations
For the 2023 Asian Cup, one of the world’s largest international football tournaments, Feed Me Light was commissioned to create standout content for both the event itself and its long-term cultural legacy. Our work spanned two major creative umbrellas.
Mascots
The first creative umbrella, Mascots, involved redesigning the characters originally introduced for the 2019 tournament and reimagining them for a new audience. For the 2D work, we produced a two-and-a-half-minute anime-inspired film.
For the 3D work, we created assets for large-scale anamorphic out-of-home screens, along with bespoke shorts for social media, building a cinematic universe around the reimagined characters to spark intrigue in the lead-up to the 2023 opening ceremony.
Kelilah and Demnah
The second umbrella, Kelilah and Demnah, stemmed from the organisers’ desire to create an IP that would endure beyond the tournament. Inspired by a centuries-old fable, originating in the Indian subcontinent and carried across the Indian Ocean region from Arabia to Indonesia, we developed a cinematic narrative for the opening ceremony in which each of the 28 competing nations was represented by an animal. This laid the foundation for a story world designed to live on long after the final whistle.
From reimagined mascots in both 2D and 3D to a cinematic opening ceremony rooted in centuries-old storytelling, the 2023 Asian Cup allowed us to explore a wide range of creative avenues, character design, animation, narrative development, and large-scale experiential content. Each element was crafted to resonate with audiences in its own way, from bespoke social shorts to stadium-sized visuals. The result was a unified body of work that elevated the tournament experience and established stories and characters with a life far beyond the event itself.
