Blinkink Director on Bringing BBC's World Cup Tapestry to Life

Following the release of the BBC's epic FIFA World Cup spot last week, we caught up with Blinkink director Nicos Livesey to find out what it was like creating such an intricate piece.

He admits that despite not being a football fan, he loved every second on set and shares some of the difficulties he had to overcome to make the campaign's tapestry a reality.

Above: BBC, The Tapestry

What appealed about the script?

The entire concept felt totally solid, it gave reason to be doing embroidered animation. Having used this frame by frame technique before, four years ago, for a music video (Throne; Tharsis Sleeps), I’d always wanted to explore it further. But there was never a reason to use it. The tapestry idea totally made sense with the technique.

It was then the ability to take these extremely iconic moments from the World Cup and be able to swing the camera around players, create dynamic angles, seamless transitions, dive into oceans and fly off into space. It was the visually free flowing journey that I’m totally into.

How much of a challenge did you expect communicating the message through tapestry would be and was it the case or did it just flow?

Having used the embroidery process before, I had a good idea of the restraints. I knew the time implications. We had to work at roughly an A5 size for each frame, to get it done in time. So if we had something too small in shot then you wouldn’t be able to to tell what it was, as the stitch wouldn’t be able to pick up the detail. Making the players recognisable at a small scale was also a little tricky, but it just required lots of sample testing before we stitched out entire shots.

Above: The loom at work.

Obviously the 2018 FIFA World Cup is a huge event. How did you manage the pressure of working on such a big job? 

It was oddly the most smooth flowing and pressure free job I have ever worked on. I think it was massively due to how relaxed and collaborative it was working with the BBC creative team. From day one, they made me feel totally at ease, especially as I know nothing about football. 

This combined with a great team and working with incredibly talented people who were excited to work on it, alleviated any big job fears.

The entire concept felt totally solid, it gave reason to be doing embroidered animation.

Tell us about the different scenes… where was the film shot; did the logistics go according to plan; and how long did it take to shoot?

The awesome animation was done at The Line Animation and it was great to work so closely in house with them. Then every frame was taken to The London Embroidery Studio who digitised all the frames with an amazing team and then stitched them all out in their studio. They made each frame look exquisite and all worked incredibly hard.

That all went to plan with a slight overlap between shooting the frames and still embroidering.

We shot it all at the incredible Clapham Road studios with D.O.P Matt Day. We had a one day shoot for the live action concrete embroidery machine that was made by Freeform and art directed by the awesome Gordon Allen. We then had about five days rostrum shoot for all the embroidered frames.