The Mill complete Barclays’ Premiership spot

The Mill have helped Barclays publicise its sponsorship of the Premiership with a 60 second spot, ‘Managers’, that follows the build-up to a Newcastle United match.
The swarm of ‘Toon Army’ fans all appear to be a plethora of Bobby Robsons. Everyone from baby with dummy to well-endowed women have the head of Sir Bobby. The commercial ends with the line: “For the 60 million Football Managers.”
In total, The Mill completed over 480 head replacements, most of them with Sir Bobby’s face. In reality, only three are genuine, the rest were composited in post. There are also a few cameos from footballing’s managerial elite: Sam Allardyce, Harry Redknapp, Alex Ferguson, David O’Leary, Arsene Wenger and Steve Bruce.
With a script like this, head replacement is inevitable. But shooting with such busy celebrities also poses a logistical problem – how to coordinate their diaries so they all appear in the same location on the same day – which is generally only resolved by head replacement: shooting each celeb separately on bluescreen at the correct angle, matting out their head and compositing it into the relevant footage. Sounds easy enough on paper, but each head has to be tracked seamlessly onto a moving body. The comp is then made convincing using focus, painting, motion blur and additional light. All body extras were given wigs to provide extra points of reference.
“Normally we’d like a whole day in Flame for each head replacement,” said The Mill’s lead Flame artist, Barnsely, “but we only had four weeks, so we had to cram in over 20 finished replacements per day”. Hence, the size of The Mill’s rather large Flame team. To further complicate matters, some managers providing the cameo roles weren’t available for shooting until dangerously near the airdate. This in turn dictated the offline edit and post schedules.
“We were up against it,” said Barnsely, “but somehow we pulled it off.”
(GB)