Seven Directors, One Epic Clash: Making Uncommon’s Ambitious Clash Royale Film

To celebrate the launch of ‘Heroes’, a major new game mechanic for the global hit Clash Royale, Uncommon Creative Studio Stockholm set out to fulfil a long-standing request from the community: a fully fledged Clash Royale film.

The result is an eight-minute, genre-hopping fight sequence crafted by seven directors across seven production companies, each given total creative freedom and only the barest threads to connect their scenes.

LBB caught up with five of those involved to find out how they pulled off this filmmaking feat, how they approached the brief, built their worlds in isolation, and contributed to one of the most unexpected and craft-forward gaming films of the year, with insight from Uncommon and Supercell. They include: Shotopop ECD/producer Carin Stanford; Squeeze director Matt Desjardin, Gizmo director Ema Verruno; Blinkink executive producer Bart Yates and Riff Raff director Mischa Rozema.

LBB> What was the idea behind this campaign, and what did you brief Uncommon?

Gabriel Caramelo, global marketing lead at Clash Royale> Clash Royale is genuinely living its best moment since launch. We’re seeing tens of millions of players logging in every day, and the energy around the game has never been higher. With that momentum, we knew we needed something special that would keep fans hooked, excited, and proud to be part of our world.

So we created Heroes, a new form of characters built to evolve how Clash Royale is played. And a launch this big demanded a campaign to match. Our brief was simple: position Heroes as the most iconic, gameplay-shaping update in Clash Royale’s lifetime.

LBB> How did you choose to interpret this brief, and at what stage did you decide to structure the film around seven vignettes from seven different directors?

Max Hultberg, founding partner at Uncommon Stockholm> Clash Royale is a card-based game, so we want to show the four characters competing to be chosen for the hero card slot.

We fell in love with the simple premise of a fight scene that just goes on and on, moving through different genres and animation styles before landing in the Clash Royale universe. This naturally led us to the idea of giving seven different production companies the chance to produce their own hero slot within our film.

The simplicity of the premise meant we could give them a lot of creative freedom. We provided transitions into and out of their segment and made sure the mix of styles worked well together

LBB> The film feels inspired by a game of Exquisite Corpses. What prompts or clues were you given from the scene preceding yours, and how did that inform the world you built within your segment?

Carin> As ours was the starting beat, we only had the end of our film to consider and the following beat. The brief was to have a character fall into a wall and that the next studio would have their characters fall out of the wall. We had a chat with Riff Raff and discussed that our storyboard had Giant crashing through a castle wall and the rest is history. We weren't given too much more info on what Riff Raff were doing, only a small amend to have him crashing forwards instead of backwards as we'd originally boarded.

A still from Carin's segment.

Matt> We knew the beat before us was using a stop motion approach, and that it was going to be dark and gritty. We also knew all the creatives had to stick to a fight theme. The biggest take away from the little information we had was the idea to strive for contrast between segments with a brighter, lighthearted fun animation.

A still from Matt's direction.

Ema> The only prompt we received from the previous segment was surprisingly minimal: our beat had to begin with the Musketeer jumping from a rooftop. That was the single clue we were given, and we had no information about what the other directors were doing before or after us.

Working with such limited guidance shaped the way we approached the world of our beat. Since the narrative was completely open, we focused first on understanding where our moment could sit within the broader arc of the film. From there, we imagined a pantheon of heroes; an iconic location that felt rooted in Clash lore and could naturally host a confrontation between four of its champions.

The idea was that these heroes, all part of the same legendary lineage, would meet beneath the giant statues of their predecessors and fight for the chance to cross the bridge into the throne hall. That structure came directly from the freedom offered by the brief: use the four characters, start with the Musketeer’s jump, and build everything else from scratch.

Seeing the final film later was incredible, because despite each team working in isolation, with different media, styles, and tones, the storytelling tension carried seamlessly from one beat to the next. It really did feel like an exquisite corpse in the best possible way: varied, surprising, but unified by a shared sense of momentum.

A still from Ema's section.

Bart> Each of us were given just the characters to start and end on, then asked to concept, write, and produce our section. We were also each given a fixed budget to work with and left to spend it however we liked, delivering a sequence as long as we were comfortable with. Our director Nicos put together a top-line couple-page outline on tone, design references, and the story arc, which Uncommon and Supercell signed off on. After that, we just hit the ground running!

We’re all fans of the Supercell / Clash world and wanted to try a totally fresh aesthetic… and of course make it as weird and dark as we could get away with.

We did quick FYI check-ins along the way, but they were very light-touch, just to make sure everything aligned with game lore, character designs, etc. Each company produced their sequence concurrently and handled the post themselves.

All in all, it was a super fun process and it’s amazing to see what you can achieve when you strip back the usual layers of process and let the filmmakers crack on… Who needs AI, eh!

A visual from BLINKINK's involvement.

Mischa> The brief I received was completely open. It just needed to be a fight scene. So I just started thinking about cinema’s greatest fight scenes. But I also wanted to up the game. So what’s bigger and better than a fight…? A battle! The biggest battles out there: ‘LOTR’ and ‘GOT’. That was my starting point, which I knew would be a fun shoot. But this couldn’t just be a pretentious and serious battle scene. Where’s the comedy in that? So I thought of the complete opposite kind of fight:the food fight was born. Now if I could only connect these scenes….

A still from Riff Raff's filmic contribution.