The making of Nike Football’s longest brand film to date called for VFX work on nearly half of the 350 shots in the edit, 125 of which required full-scale crowd and stadium work.

Following previous Nike work including the viral ‘Winner Stays’ from the 2014 FIFA World Cup, The Mill’s involvement in ‘The Switch’ began early on. Executive Creative Director Phil Crowe explains, “For me, this was a career highlight: I’ve known and worked with Ringan and Rich Orrick for nearly 20 years, and many of the creatives too, allowing a unique bond and dynamic on this huge job.”

The Mill’s primary challenge was to build the environments of the four stadiums seen throughout – Wembley, Etihad, Portugal National Stadium and Rotherham – in order to look as authentic as possible.

The piece was filmed over the course of two months in Madrid with Shoot Supervisors Phil and Andrew Wood (Barnsley), and later taken to Phil’s homeland of Yorkshire where they were joined by Lead 2D VFX Artist and Shoot Supervisor John Shirley. In Madrid, Phil recalls, “We shot in a train depot where AstroTurf was laid and a very limited playing area was created. Bleachers were added to give us crowds, giving us exact performance reference for when we would later replicate the crowd in Massive.” 

During the shoot, Phil was joined by Lead 2D VFX Artist and Shoot Supervisor John Shirley. Given the scale and precision of VFX work that would need to be done, John says, “Phil and I felt it was beneficial to transition the job into post while we were still at the shoot. It’s not the kind of job you can really ‘jump’ into.”

John helped facilitate the look and feel of ‘The Switch’, noting the difference in style compared to ‘Winner Stays’. For the latter, he says, “The brief was that the match was a bit of a fantasy, so we had some creative freedom when it came to designing and implementing the stadiums and creating an overall look. For ‘The Switch’, everything had to look and feel real, so it definitely upped the challenge for us. We had a reference film that Ringan sent us, and we used extensive reference of real games both in video and stills. We sent supervisors to Etihad and Wembley stadiums for reference of the architecture, lighting, advertisements, crowd and stadium staff – even down to the televisions in the premium suites and the thickness of the grass – to help us when we built the stadiums.”

The team also built a brand new library of CG humans, creating their clothing and accessories from scratch to elevate the level of detail. Lead 3D VFX Artist Chris Bayol says, “We developed a huge amount of variables – ranging between 700,000 and 1,000,000 – including body types, articles of clothing, hairstyles, accessories, and color and texture variations, which helped sell the realism."

 Adds Creative Director Robert Sethi, “We studied a lot of game shoots to examine the exact composition of what the crowds looked like – all different sizes of adults, children, women, men – and determine the ratio of characters for these particular games. We then took that information and imitated our findings when we built our own crowds.”

In regards to lighting, the team elevated the drama to allow for a unique look. Robert continues, “Shadow and light was used to get that slightly more dramatic look on set, which differs slightly from traditional stadium lighting. For us, this meant that when went into CG and built the stadium, we made it as real as we could, and moved the light to the correct locations. We usually match CG to live action, and in this case we also matched the live action to CG.”

The grass in the spot, Chris notes, was done as a fur groom and broken out into sections of the pitch. "Instead of using mowing patterns as a colour texture, which would always be constant, we created a custom grooming setup that allowed us to texture the azimuth of the grass blades relative to world space to replicate grass that had been mowed over in a pattern. When the camera would move, the moiré/fresnel effect would react accordingly."

From concept to final delivery, the project was the result of longstanding teamwork from all involved. VFX Producer Anastasia von Rahl comments, “With the scale and length of the project, the open communication between the companies involved allowed for creative problem solving throughout the process. Additionally, the team, asset and shot management from John and Chris was impeccable. There were many moving parts and they were on top of it all. It was a pleasure for me to be a part of the process.”

Phil concludes, “This job was all about the collaboration and relationships with Rattling Stick, Ringan, DP Matt Libatique, Work Editorial and, of course, Wieden+Kennedy. We're insanely proud of this project and the fantastic talent, not only here at The Mill but to everyone involved.

…Not to mention this project provided the opportunity for my mum to cook us all Sunday lunch and take us on a trip down the coal mining museum!"