Lay's Bandwagon

Project overview

For Lay's FIFA World Cup 2026 campaign, Bandwagon gives casual American soccer fans permission to join the party without pretending they have followed the sport since birth. Will Ferrell climbs aboard a literal bandwagon, with Marshawn Lynch representing the American-sports perspective and David Beckham supplying a little international football credibility from the driver's seat. The film was directed by Jake Szymanski, created by 72andSunny Los Angeles and produced through Gifted Youth, with VFX and colour by JAMM.

As the project's digital matte painter, I helped turn the journey into a properly continent-sized road trip. The work covered open farmland, ranch buildings, distant cities, empty highways and mountain passes, developing skies, horizons, vegetation, architecture, road layouts and atmosphere across a series of moving plates. Each environment needed enough scale to sell the band's progress while remaining natural enough that the landscape never competed with Will Ferrell riding through it on an enormous yellow wagon.

Digital matte painting is often the art of making extensive interference look like a pleasant drive. Farms were rearranged, skylines relocated, roads persuaded to head somewhere more useful and entire mountain ranges asked to shuffle sideways for the composition. Clouds received an unreasonable amount of direction. The finished scenery had to feel casually inevitable, even though neither its construction nor the vehicle travelling through it was casual.

JAMM's official project credits list me as the sole DMP artist. Shortly after launch, Bandwagon placed second in LBB and System1's 2026 Advertising World Cup consumer ranking with a score of 5.1 Stars. No formal industry award or nomination has been verified yet for this newly released campaign.