Maradona I The Fall

Blue Spill returns to work with Emmy Award-winning director, Angus McQueen (Ronachan Films) on ‘Maradona: The Fall’ our second collaboration on this subject! The film explores the story behind Diego Maradona and how he was thrown out of the USA FIFA World Cup after failing a post-match drugs test, exploring the build-up and aftermath of one of the most notorious moments in sport with interviews from the characters at the centre of the drama.

“The image of Diego Maradona running like a maniac to the camera during the World Cup at USA94 is iconic: a flawed genius, a man purporting to be back to his best, but seemingly totally out of control, wracked by demons and high on drugs.”

Angus McQueen

With this quote and iconic shot as our starting point, we visually catapulted the viewer into the same collage world of the title sequence for ‘Maradona in Mexico’ (our previous collaboration), this not only continued the aesthetic already established with our previous title sequence but also reflected Maradona’s eccentric and larger than life character.

As the narrative centred around USA94, we drew upon the graphic identity of the World Cup of that year and infused our sequence with a 90s aesthetic, combining video and photographic elements which we animated and textured and through the addition of geometric patterns and bright colours, stylised to visually fit in this iconic era.

For our title sequence’s narrative arc we wanted to reflect the story at the centre of the documentary in a humorous and exaggerated manner while giving a subtle nod to the social, cultural and political context of the time.

We extended this poppy 90s aesthetic across our designs for the lower thirds and location cards, using vibrant colours, black outlines and a playful doubling of the text to give a graphic 3D effect reflective of pop culture visuals of the time to really draw the viewer into the time and place in which the events unfolded.

We delivered the title sequence for the show in 4K using an HDR ACES workflow in Adobe After Effects & Autodesk Flame.