Video Credit: Kansas City Royals
This is a tabletop film production case study breaking down how Claro Studioworks engineered custom tabletop SFX rigs and utilized live remote production to execute the 2026 Nike × Kansas City Royals City Connect campaign.
Project Overview
It’s not every day that a Major League Baseball team asks for a discovery call with a food studio, but in late January of this year, I found myself talking to the EP of the Kansas City Royals. Were we talking about a new LTO menu at Kauffman Stadium? Perhaps a partnership with Budweiser in St. Louis? Actually, no, we were discussing new uniforms.
Each year, MLB and Nike’s City Connect collaboration designs alternate uniforms for select baseball teams informed by the heritage, people, and rhythm of their city.
“The [City Connect] collection reflects the energy and pride of each club’s community, expressed through bold, expressive designs that feel personal and lived in… Familiar elements are reimagined through new expressions that resonate with today’s fans and the next generation.” (Source: Nike Newsroom)
This year, Nike’s work with the KC Royals brought the City of Fountains fresh colors, Art Deco styling, and a linear fountain motif woven throughout.
As the countdown to the long-awaited uniform reveal drew closer, Claro Studioworks joined the project to produce a visual library of liquid special effects, while separate production units shot location exteriors across Kansas City and Spring Training in Phoenix.
With fewer than five weeks from discovery call to final delivery, we maintained a strict schedule and built custom effects, giving the Royals vivid, distinctive imagery that fully embraced their namesake fountains. Integrating our remote production workflow allowed producers to monitor lighting tests, prep days, and live takes in real time, saving travel days and maintaining a tight schedule.
The three teams working in tandem delivered a grand-slam uniform reveal, as well as an asset library for stadium displays and season-long social media content.
Creative
Debuting the City Connect uniforms required a media package capable of spanning social channels, print, web, and digital displays. Our role centered on designing and shooting ten high-speed water effects and delivering footage quickly so post-production could build the deliverables.
After helping launch a flagship new beer the previous summer, we came into the shoot with plenty of muscle memory for liquids. We supplied production with a varied collection of existing capabilities, including sprays, waves, drops, bubbles, and holding tanks. Two weeks out from the shoot, we began an intensive design sprint to build and test three additional custom effects for the project.
Extending the functionality of an existing strike rig, we built a new, water-friendly impact surface. When the hammer slams into the flexible surface from below, it sends transparent curtains of bubble-free water upwards – a variation on the fountain theme that stays true to the spirit of the creative brief.
Our most striking effect is the multi-fountain: nine separate fountains submerged in a massive, water-filled vessel blasting upwards — absolutely stunning on its own, jaw-dropping at 1,000 fps. Two independent switches allow us to control timing and pattern, while adjustable pressure gives us control of fountain height and volume.
We also fabricated a little something special for when Bobby Witt Jr. hits a home run into the fountains at Kauffman Stadium. Baseballs secured onto transparent rods are fastened to an actuator hovering above a water tank. In the blink of an eye, the ball plunges underwater while our high-speed camera captures every unbelievable detail. The rod is completely hidden in the flurry of bubbles, yielding an extraordinary effect with no post-production cleanup required.
The resulting collection of water visuals became an evergreen asset in the Royals’ media library and a recurring feature across social media accounts and on Kauffman Stadium’s video boards all season long.
Production
We completed the entire project in just under five weeks, from the initial discovery call to final wrap. Shoot prep kicked off two weeks before the first production day with lighting tests in our Springfield studio, as the production team in Kansas City monitored live takes and dialed in the look.
Physical production brought the crew together for three days in-studio, split into one pre-lighting day and two shoot days. The team of five consisted of an SFX director, gaffer, camera operator, production designer, and PA.
While our crew and one client rep executed in-studio, the rest of the production team directed feedback and approved takes from home base inside Kauffman Stadium.
Throughout the process, Claro’s remote production system allowed us to keep Phoenix and KC production teams in the loop with live video feeds while providing immediate proxies mere minutes after calling cut. Our system provides you with:
- Dual-Feed Visibility: A live feed from the hero camera paired with a user-controllable studio camera so you always see the context of the room.
- Synchronized Review: Watch high-speed playback simultaneously with our on-set team.
- Real-Time Communication: Switch to a face-to-face video call, signaled directly by our studio call lights.
- Rapid Delivery: Proxy footage delivered within minutes of calling cut.
Summary & Impact
To be totally honest, in the first moments of that discovery call, I almost turned the project down. I thought, “Sportswear and baseball teams aren’t within Claro’s industry focus… probably not a good fit.”
It turned out to be the perfect fit.
It gave us the opportunity to prove that visual engineering can be easily outsourced, delivered affordably, and directed entirely remotely with total on-set presence.
Visual engineering and custom effects require dedicated space and time to experiment. Shifting that technical lift to a specialized studio makes practical sense, but only if your team can stay connected in the process. The Nike × KC Royals project showed how seamless that partnership can be.
Claro delivered stadium-scale visuals on schedule, kept travel days off the budget, and showed that outsourcing complex special effects can be hands-on from anywhere.
For producers leading productions with tight constraints and ambitious visuals, Claro Studioworks offers a reliable way to capture specialty tabletop sequences without sacrificing quality or oversight.
Tabletop Film Production
Claro Studioworks provides tabletop film production for agency, brand, and commercial clients in the food, beverage, and CPG sectors. We combine custom tabletop SFX rigs, high-speed cinematography, and motion control to execute complex practical visual effects in a controlled studio environment. Our integrated remote production pipeline allows off-site directors, executive producers, and creative teams to monitor live sets, direct takes, and approve proxy footage in real time from anywhere in the world.