Under Armour kicked its global growth into high gear in 2011 when it became the official kit supplier for Barclays Premier League football team Tottenham Hotspur. It was the American apparel company’s largest team sponsorship to date, and a roll-out of innovative engagement initiatives quickly followed, introducing fans to the new partnership for the 2012-2013 football season.

With those courtesies out of the way, Under Armour has sought to drive home brand awareness amidst Tottenham supporters for the 2013-2014 season. To help with that initiative, it called upon Amsterdam-based production company Onesize to visualize a grittily realistic spot that closes the distance between the Hotspur athletes wearing Under Armour clothing, and the fans who worship them.


“The idea was to have a conversation between the football players and the fans,” said Rogier Hendriks, co-founder and creative director of Onesize. Knowing the finished :90 spot would be projected to fans on the giant screen in the team’s stadium, Hendriks hoped to create an urgent level of athlete/spectator intimacy by employing a documentary aesthetic through handheld footage and extreme close-ups.

“I wanted them to connect closely and not create a distance [by putting] the players on a pedestal,” he said. By humanizing Hotspur players and making them more “real,” Hendriks would also be honoring the Under Armour brand, which is more “raw than, say, Nike or Adidas. It’s more underground, which really appealed to me.”

With a rousing call-to-action script penned by Under Armour’s copywriters in hand, Hendriks and his team traveled to London, where they set about shooting both Hotspur stars and fans reciting the copy in various locales around the city. The fan footage was treated no differently than the player footage, and Hendriks instructed his director of photography, the Oscar-nominated Michael Coulter, to shoot from the shoulder, and freely grab footage in between takes so as to capture subjects in their most unguarded states. In the final video above, it’s even possible to see points where Coulter quickly pulled focus, hurriedly sharpening his image to snag a spontaneous moment. Hendriks relished finding these moments in post, and intentionally left them in to add to the spot’s on-the-fly realism.


The chance to work with live-action “was very special for Onesize,” said Hendriks. Experts in motion graphics, Onesize was relatively unaccustomed to shooting without special effects, and had to learn quickly to live without them in order to successfully complete the spot. Even the tricked out Under Armour jerseys in the film, with their flowing video projections, were done in 2D by way of Aftereffects, the soccer footage superimposed over blank white t-shirts.

Complicating the rapid adjustment further was the project’s rigorous production schedule: Onesize had three days to shoot the required footage and less than three weeks to narrow that footage down to a polished 90 seconds. Just to make things extra-interesting, Hotspur star winger Gareth Bale, who figured prominently in the original film, was sent to Real Madrid midway through post-production and could no longer appear, requiring a re-cut.

But despite working long hours to meet its deadline, Onesize handled the new challenges with relative aplomb thanks to its penchant for creating detailed animatics. Prior to shooting, the company created a mock-up 3D video of the finished spot, replete with proper camera angles. That extra mile of preproduction, said Hendriks, “really helps us and it helps the client as well.” Before production even began, “the director of photography already knew where to put his camera and what our framing would be… we can even add sound design [in advance]. Our composer had already started working on the audio track while we were still shooting in London.”

In the end, the Under Armour experience was “liberating” for Hendrik and his team, and he hopes the work will bring Onesize more live-action projects down the road.

“We weren’t really comfortable with this approach [at the start],” he said, “but Under Armour didn’t contact us for nothing. They contacted us because they believed that we could create a beautiful film.”

[Images courtesy of Onesize.]

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