SoulCycle is more than a workout—it’s an experience. We have spent the past few years crafting a plethora of visuals that have helped shape the creative direction of the brand.
SoulCycle is more than a workout. It is a room full of rhythm, resistance, sweat, release, and shared belief. Across our long-running collaboration with the brand, RIOT helped translate that energy into films, teasers, instructor stories, and launch campaigns that made the SoulCycle experience feel as powerful on screen as it does in the studio.
As a sports and fitness creative agency, RIOT’s work with SoulCycle sits at the intersection of movement, music, community, and transformation. From commercial video production to branded content, brand storytelling, and creative direction, each piece of work was built to capture the emotional voltage of the ride without sanding down its rawness.
For SoulCycle: Turn It Up Campaign Film, RIOT was brought in to executive produce and post produce a campaign film shot at the Chelsea SoulCycle studio over two days in March 2019. Directed by Nick Bentley and filmed by Director of Photography Paul Kahler, the film featured SoulCycle instructors and riding talent moving with the kind of collective intensity that makes the room feel alive.
The work was production-heavy, rhythm-led, and built around bodies in motion. RIOT’s role across executive production, post production, editing, color, and motion helped shape the final campaign into something kinetic and polished without losing the heat of the studio. It was SoulCycle as performance, as ritual, as release.
Before the full SoulActivate campaign launched, RIOT created SoulCycle: SoulActivate Teaser, a short, charged piece designed to make people ask one question: what is coming? The teaser dropped a week before the full film and quickly lit up the SoulCycle community, sparking conversation around the new class and the energy behind it.
That anticipation was intentional. The teaser gave audiences a controlled flash of the world we were building, enough attitude, mystery, and body heat to make the release feel like an event. It was a perfect example of how social videos can do more than fill a feed. They can create tension, desire, and momentum.
The full SoulCycle: SoulActivate campaign introduced a high-energy HIIT experience that was intense, raw, and entirely different from a traditional SoulCycle ride. Directed by Chris “MUG5” Maguire and shot by Zach Jopling, the campaign used an Alexa Mini, vintage 80s cinema lenses, SkyPanels, and Astera AX1s to build a visual language that mirrored the class itself: sweat, struggle, recovery, release, and breakthrough.
Music sat at the heart of the edit. Through careful pacing and sound design, the campaign emphasized the contrast between all-out intensity and the recovery moments that gave SoulActivate its distinct rhythm. The result was a campaign that did not simply explain the class. It let viewers feel the pulse before they ever stepped into the room.
After the intensity of SoulActivate, RIOT shifted gears with SoulCycle: SoulFundamentals, a campaign for a beginner-friendly class designed to make the SoulCycle experience more accessible, approachable, and welcoming.
The creative challenge was different this time. SoulFundamentals was not about intimidation. It was about reassurance. The class was built for new riders who wondered whether they would keep up, know what to do, or feel out of place. The campaign needed to demystify the experience while still carrying the unmistakable charge of the SoulCycle brand.
With two instructors leading each session, SoulFundamentals offered a hands-on environment where riders could learn the basics, set up their bike, catch the rhythm, understand the moves, and feel supported from the first pedal stroke. RIOT’s campaign framed that invitation with clarity and warmth, showing that accessibility does not have to mean losing energy. It can be the thing that lets more people feel it.
Some of RIOT’s most resonant work with SoulCycle came through the instructor docufilms. These stories moved beyond class formats and campaign launches into something more intimate: the personal lives, philosophies, setbacks, and transformations behind the people leading the room.
Mike Press: A SoulCycle Journey of Resilience, Transformation, and Triumph follows an instructor whose story is rooted in athletic discipline, injury, reinvention, and inner strength. A former 400-meter hurdler from Mount Vernon, NY, Mike rebuilt his path after a torn ACL and meniscus injury threatened to end his athletic career. At SoulCycle, that resilience became part of his language as an instructor.
Mike’s classes are built around precision, energy, music, and mental endurance. His story gave RIOT a powerful human lens on the SoulCycle experience: resistance as growth, movement as recovery, and the ride as a space where people can find their way back to themselves.
Across the wider SoulCycle docufilm series, including Souereya’s Journey and Trammell: A SoulCycle Journey of Strength & Second Chances, RIOT explored how fitness brands can become vessels for personal transformation. These were not standard instructor profiles. They were human-led brand stories about strength, vulnerability, music, resilience, and community.
What makes SoulCycle powerful is not only the workout. It is the emotional architecture around it: the dark room, the music, the instructor’s voice, the collective push, the small private breakthroughs happening inside a shared physical experience. RIOT’s role was to carry that atmosphere across formats, from launch teasers and commercial films to docufilms, campaign assets, photography, motion, edit, color, and sound.
That is where our work with SoulCycle found its force. We were not simply documenting people on bikes. We were capturing a culture of movement and translating it into a visual system built for screens, social platforms, campaigns, and community.
Through campaign photography, motion graphics, production, post, and story-led direction, the work helped SoulCycle communicate new class formats, celebrate instructor voices, and deepen the emotional world around the brand.
RIOT’s partnership with SoulCycle reflects what happens when fitness content is treated with the same care as film, music, and culture. Every campaign had a job to do, from launching SoulActivate to welcoming beginners into SoulFundamentals, but the work always moved with feeling. It carried the sweat, the sound, the tension, the joy, and the strange magic of a room full of people choosing to push together.
For RIOT, SoulCycle remains a defining example of how sports and fitness storytelling can move past pure performance and into something deeper. It is not just about what the body can do. It is about what the ride unlocks.
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