Nissan's Art Installation Idents Capture Emotional History of Football's Champions League
Dark Horses approached Friends Electric and directing collective Polynoid with a deck to conceptualise and execute the Nissan sponsor idents for the UEFA Champions League.
Off the bat, Friends Electric saw the huge potential this one has, visually and conceptually.
Dark Horses used a perfect introductory description as a foreshadowing of the type of job this will be. The idents should be... “....the kind of idents that other idents have posters of hanging on their bedroom wall.”
Creatively, first this meant Friends Electric had to conceptualise and digitally build a few things from scratch.
- An installation art piece that involves copious amounts of kinetic sheets of transparent LED displays.
- An architectural space that should rival the uniqueness and flowing elegance of Zaha Hadid's creative output.
- A captivating editorial homage to the biggest, most epic and most emotional moments of the history of the Champions League.
And second, it had to bring them all together in a well-balanced way, a framework that exists as the backdrop for the Nissan Ariya and Leaf.
Working with Dark Horses has been a breeze for Friends Electric from start to finish. After a few adjustment rounds involving the look and feel of the idents the team quickly jumped into its RnD and pre-pro phases. Our friends at DAT tackled the car asset creation.
Friends Electric’s creatives and digital artists started conceptualising and designing the flow of the films as well as the architectural features and first drafts of the art installation design.
A lot of work went into reviewing footage, finding the best moments and creating individual, themed storylines with them. Each of the six idents became a unique moment of soccer and the big emotions it triggers in us.
Friends electric then took these moments as its base and created the equivalent filmic interpretation in terms of art installation, car movement and editing rhythm.
One of the most important things for the team was that each element of the film, whether it’s set design, art installation or kinetic movement and dynamics reflect perfectly what the specific soccer moment is all about.
A lot of collective brainpower went into the glass art installation. From a technical point of view, it’s always a tricky task (aka nightmare) to get a lot of layered glass rendered in time. So the team took a step back and designed some custom shaders and render processes tailored for this specific task. This ensured that the lighting artists would have uncompromising creative freedom to set the stage in the most photoreal and tasteful way.
Another big aspect was the development of tools to handle, place and trigger all the soccer footage on these glass screens so we can create a believable, realistic visual art installation inside a full CG, rendered space.
