Super Greed I The Fight For Football

Blue Spill were beyond thrilled to work for the second time with director Carl Hindmarch to tell the dramatic and very recent story of the European Super League where, in the wake of the Coronavirus pandemic, owners and executives of the 12 most powerful clubs in world football attempted to join forces in a brazen power grab which broke away from centuries of sporting tradition to launch a brand new competition that would secure their club’s futures for decades to come.

We were drawn to the challenge of working on a football documentary which has all the suspense and intrigue of a thriller, charting the years of secret talks and backroom dealings culminated in this seismic announcement and the opposition which brought it down within just 48 hours.

Our inspiration for the graphic treatments, which included a title sequence, date cards, photos and explainers, looked to the visual language and tonality of cinematic thrillers. Using darker colour palettes and chiaroscuro lighting patterns, we aimed to reflect the dramatic narrative of uncovering corruption and the attempted corporate coup behind closed doors. Visually we wanted to distinguish our graphics from those of other football documentaries by not relying on classic sports tropes and to reflect the central themes of the story of plotting, intrigue and betrayal. Throughout our work we developed visual motifs which gave a subtle nod to the sporting world, weaving in elements of chalk lines, flip clocks and football iconography, such as club badges and Subuteo style figures. We injected our graphics with a brooding dark blue and black colour palette and layered redacted documents, newspaper articles and handwritten notes relating to the unfolding narrative of the documentary as abstract elements within 3D space to create a sense of a network of interlinked events being pieced together in a process of investigation to uncover the truth.

For our title sequence we wanted to narrate the history of football and its fans, from its birth, all the way up to the present day to situate the story in context and to communicate a sense of the emotional weight and resonance that this act of corporate greed had upon the football industry and its fans.

Blue Spill delivered over 50 GFX sequences in 4K using an HDR ACES workflow in Adobe After Effects & Autodesk Flame.