At the 2020 Olympic Summer Games in Tokyo, the world will welcome four new sports – skateboarding, surfing, and sport-climbing – all of which were born from grassroots in individual expression and nonconformity.

World Debut follows the unlikely evolution of these bold outsider sports in parallel with the Olympic Summer Games. We’ll hear stories from athletes, stewards, and fans who worked behind the scenes with the Olympic movement to understand how new sports are accepted into the Games. Through never-before-seen archival footage, and original interviews from the gate-keepers of the Games, the film teaches the outside world what it is like to be integrated and accepted into the world’s most publicized athletic event.

My vision was to utilize some of the most exciting moments in these sports history to guide our audience through the evolution and process of sport selection in the Games; for the audience, they needed to understand why were these new sports selected for Tokyo 2020?

To contextualize the difficulties with bringing culture-based sports into the Olympic Games we leaned into animation, and heart-felt storytelling from the individuals who dedicated the past 20 years to this cause.

Lastly, we wanted to entertain our audiences which for us meant leaning into the raw and gritty aesthetic as well as music that these counter-culture sports embody.