The production team at Radical Media shot the world famous footballer on a green screen, before handing over footage to The Mill's studio, who carefully roto'd, graded and treated each shot before setting about creating the formidable digital panther, flaming ball and exploding goal animations using a combination of AFX and Flash animation techniques.
Each of these finessed shots were then projected onto buildings, streets, parks and cars over night in Barcelona and captured in live-action by director Luc Schurgers.
Design director Tom Wansbrough-Jones comments "It was an exciting prospect to create a series of shots that would eventually be projected onto the streets and buildings all over Barcelona. Integrating live action footage with hand drawn animation and then projecting all of this onto physical real life objects gave the whole piece an extra dimension."
He adds: "Once we had all agreed on which live action plates of Messi were best foreach shot, our team went about animating frame by frame over the roto'd/ graded footage. This was then comped in After Effects, adding in any extra elements of sparks and colour to bring each shot to life and tie them all together as asequence.The results look fantastic as Messi is projected runningacross multiple surfaces including trees, cars, streets and buildings all at the same time, giving so much depth to each shot."