The brief, send England into the 2026 World Cup with something worth watching. No client. No budget. No crew.
Most World Cup content starts with the players. Squad announcements, training montages, hype reels. All activation designed to build momentum for something that's already happening. The more interesting question was: what does it actually mean to wear those three lions? Where did they come from, and why do they still matter?
The answer turned out to be 900 years old. The three lions on the England badge trace directly back to Richard the Lionheart who used them to represent his three kingdoms: King of the English, Duke of Normandy, Duke of Aquitaine. Three lions. Three different kinds of power. Only complete when they're together.
The concept, take that medieval myth and run it onto a modern football pitch. Richard raises his shield on a battlefield. The three golden heraldic lions leap off it, transform into photorealistic animals, and play the game of their lives. At the end they return to the pitch all three running side by side, triumphant, toward the camera. As they run, the England crest fades in around them, the three lions dissolving into the badge they've always been. The legend completing itself.
The whole film plays to God Save the King from first frame to last. It ends on "Happy and Glorious": a lyric from the anthem, the words printed inside the collar of the England Nike Home Stadium shirts 2026, and the title card the film has been building toward the entire time. That triple meaning was the creative spine. Once it was found, everything else organised itself around it.
Each lion maps directly to one of Richard's three kingdoms and to something true about what it takes to win a World Cup.
The AI workflow ran in five distinct stages, each tool doing the job it's actually built for.
Midjourney generated all the hero shots, Richard the Lionheart, the three lions in action, the battlefield, the stadium sequences. Once the hero shots were locked, Nano Banana Pro and ChatGPT Image 2 built the character reference sheets, establishing each lion's face, build and colouring as a consistent visual bible. Those reference sheets went back into Midjourney to generate the static storyboard frames. With the storyboard locked in, Seedance 2.0 animated the footage. This stage involved the most iteration, certain shots required hero images to be rebuilt specifically to give Seedance 2 cleaner geometry to work from. Getting a transformation sequence or a complex spatial shot to animate convincingly meant going back to Midjourney, adjusting the still, and re-ingesting it. The tools were in constant conversation with each other. After Effects handled post-production: stitching the footage together, colour grading the full film, adding SFX and music.
Come on England. Happy and Glorious. 🏴
Role: Art Director
Client: England
(A self-initiated passion project. Not affiliated with the England football team or the FIFA.)
-- AI tools ---
Workflow build: Figma Weave
Image gen: Midjourney, NanoBanana Pro, ChatGPT 2
Video gen: Seedance 2, Grok Imagine Video
Most World Cup content starts with the players. Squad announcements, training montages, hype reels. All activation designed to build momentum for something that's already happening. The more interesting question was: what does it actually mean to wear those three lions? Where did they come from, and why do they still matter?
The answer turned out to be 900 years old. The three lions on the England badge trace directly back to Richard the Lionheart who used them to represent his three kingdoms: King of the English, Duke of Normandy, Duke of Aquitaine. Three lions. Three different kinds of power. Only complete when they're together.
The concept, take that medieval myth and run it onto a modern football pitch. Richard raises his shield on a battlefield. The three golden heraldic lions leap off it, transform into photorealistic animals, and play the game of their lives. At the end they return to the pitch all three running side by side, triumphant, toward the camera. As they run, the England crest fades in around them, the three lions dissolving into the badge they've always been. The legend completing itself.
The whole film plays to God Save the King from first frame to last. It ends on "Happy and Glorious": a lyric from the anthem, the words printed inside the collar of the England Nike Home Stadium shirts 2026, and the title card the film has been building toward the entire time. That triple meaning was the creative spine. Once it was found, everything else organised itself around it.
Each lion maps directly to one of Richard's three kingdoms and to something true about what it takes to win a World Cup.
- The Captain: King of the English. Born to lead. Carries the weight of expectation from childhood, probably more than the other two combined.
- The Hungry One: Duke of Normandy. The outsider who crossed water to earn his place. The one who had to fight for it rather than inherit it.
- The Wildcard : Duke of Aquitaine. The southern territory. The creative one, the flair player. The one the other two don't always understand but genuinely can't win without.
- The antagonists are jaguars throughout - sleek, spotted, relentless, and visually distinct from the lions.
The AI workflow ran in five distinct stages, each tool doing the job it's actually built for.
Midjourney generated all the hero shots, Richard the Lionheart, the three lions in action, the battlefield, the stadium sequences. Once the hero shots were locked, Nano Banana Pro and ChatGPT Image 2 built the character reference sheets, establishing each lion's face, build and colouring as a consistent visual bible. Those reference sheets went back into Midjourney to generate the static storyboard frames. With the storyboard locked in, Seedance 2.0 animated the footage. This stage involved the most iteration, certain shots required hero images to be rebuilt specifically to give Seedance 2 cleaner geometry to work from. Getting a transformation sequence or a complex spatial shot to animate convincingly meant going back to Midjourney, adjusting the still, and re-ingesting it. The tools were in constant conversation with each other. After Effects handled post-production: stitching the footage together, colour grading the full film, adding SFX and music.
Come on England. Happy and Glorious. 🏴
Role: Art Director
Client: England
(A self-initiated passion project. Not affiliated with the England football team or the FIFA.)
-- AI tools ---
Workflow build: Figma Weave
Image gen: Midjourney, NanoBanana Pro, ChatGPT 2
Video gen: Seedance 2, Grok Imagine Video
FIGMA WEAVE WORKFLOW EXAMPLE
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