We were asked to help create an emotional event to launch the new Dutch Away shirt by Nike Football. Nike asked us to use the creativity and tradition of renowned Dutch Masters from the 17th century as our inspiration. The event set out to celebrate current Dutch Masters Wesley Sneijder, Natalie La Rose, Gregory van der Wiel, Reverse, Nalden, Doutzen Kroes and Afrojack, and Dutch master photographer Anton Corbijn.

Our role

Circus Family produced and directed the behind the scenes documentary and seven separate viral portraits. This content was then reworked for the launch event itself and projected onto the outside facade of the Bijenkorf in Amsterdam. We created all visuals for the launch together with …,staat Amsterdam who was responsible for the launch event.

Challenge

How would we get these press savvy characters to truly open up and speak to us sharing their thoughts on being Dutch and their background. How could we make something that stands out and at the same time is a true homage to the characters photographed by Anton Corbijn?

Solution

We decided at an early stage that this story needed to be genuine. A full scale documentary film plan was developed and the decision was made to shoot the piece on 16mm film, to stay close to Corbijn’s style of photography. A compact crew followed him and the masters on location in an old factory in Utrecht, a film studio in Milan and an abandoned warehouse in New York city. The interviews were done off camera and used as voice over in the piece. This truly opened them up and they were able to talk at ease about their successes, what being Dutch means to them and the importance of staying true to your roots.

The visuals were subtle yet supportive to the content and matched the titles in the film. Black and white, bold and straightforward. The scale however was a different story: Nike managed to stop all traffic for an hour in the center of Amsterdam to launch this project.