Summary
Nike has kicked off its new football campaign in style with ‘Write the Future’ – an epic feature length three minute ad featuring a star turn from Wayne Rooney. Continuing our unique relationship with Nike, we have collaborated with our old friends at Wieden+Kennedy, Amsterdam and director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu on a remarkable script that required us to pull out all of the stops. They don’t come much bigger or better than this...
'Write the Future' features an almighty line up of football
superstars including Rooney, Ronaldo, Drogba, Ronaldinho, Ribery,
Walcott, Fabregas and Cannavaro. The ad shows how the
slightest margin of error can lead to ultimate glory or utter
dejection, as is the case when Rooney misses a crucial pass and is
sent into a physical decline that sees him ending up washed up,
bearded, overweight and living in a caravan. The blockbuster
commercial's other highlights include a giant statue of Ronaldo and
cameos from Homer Simpson, actor Gael Garcia Bernal and Kobe
Bryant.
In one of our biggest jobs to date, the visual effects team worked
on a staggering 236 VFX shots made up of 106 football shots which
included a CG stadium complete with flags and banners, crowd
replication using Massive, grass clean up and replacement, and full
rotoscope of all the players. The other 84 effects shots
included joining up Rooney and Roger Federer's ping pong match,
creating film premiere posters and inserting a matte painting of an
industrial background to the scene featuring Rooney as a
groundsman. Our team also built the YouTube and Facebook
sequences from various elements as well as creating a fully CG
satellite and Earth matte painting. Finally there was the
enormous CG stadium build and matte painting work for the
futuristic and fantasy Christiano Ronaldo Stadium.
Our work did not stop there. Once the ad was completed, Beam
delivered 14 worldwide global adapts - which were done centrally at
The Mill - directly to international broadcasters, as well as
delivering bespoke material for localised reversioning to 6
countries and generic HD and SD digital assets to 31 other
countries.
Stephen Venning, Executive Producer of the spot, said:
"This is one of the biggest commercial VFX projects The Mill has
ever undertaken and in such a short time frame of just five
weeks. I can confidently say that there is no other company
in the world who could have achieved this level of creativity and
believability, and this is quite simply due to the dedication and
skill of our talented team of visual effects artists."
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