The Last Game is a story about risky football versus safe football. Perfect Inc. is a company run by a scientist who creates clones of Nike athletes Cristiano Ronaldo, Neymar Jr, Wayne Rooney, Zlatan Ibrahimovic, Andrés Iniesta, Franck Ribery, David Luiz and Tim Howard. These clones are precise and efficient, and they are genetically made without the capability to take risks. The scientist wants to prove that riskless football is a more effective way to play and a superior expression of the beautiful game. Ronaldo Fenomeno and the original players disagree, and they are willing to risk everything to prove the scientist wrong. There is only one way to know who is right: the Last Game.

A simple brief but a complex challenge; Bring Nike Football’s star athletes to life in animated forms that were equally recognisable and caricature for the brand’s biggest ever advertising campaign to launch during the World Cup’s opening game. The deadline was final. We had seven months.

Dozens of design versions for each player went through a painstaking approval process including via the real athletes to create characters that were a perfect balance between cartoon and gritty live-action in style.

Initially the script was just a raw idea and 16 people worked for four months on countless rewrites to achieve a coherent, exciting story with sharp dialogue and dynamite action.

While writing we were simultaneously developing the film through pre-visualisation, design, animation lighting, rendering, physics simulation, compositing and editing to make sure every second served its purpose. With three months to go we had to create 140 shots and we refined single frames until the final hour. Ultimately 25 different, incredibly rich environments made the film.

Over 300 people were involved from agency, production, post - including 101 artists and 25 animators. 3.6 million man-minutes were worked by the production team in the last four months of the project.