World Cup Stitch Up

I am really not bothered about the World Cup - but I confess to being enthralled by the BBC trailer. It is all done in embroidery! When I first started pointing at the screen and yelling "Look, Bob! look at that stitching!" my OH suggested it was probably all computer generated. But he's wrong [a rare occurrence] If you haven't seen it yet, here it is 

Two guys, Edward Usher and Xander Hart, from the BBC Creative Team were tasked with coming up with a memorable trailer [this headache occurs every four years ever since we all started humming 'Nessum Dorma'] Remembering that Russia has a great tradition of tapestries, they decided to produce something depicting the history of the World Cup. 

Then they considered the brutalist concrete architecture of the 1960s and created an "embroidery machine" reminiscent of a futuristic Moscow bus stop from the Communist era - a machine which bursts into life every four years to create a tapestry.They approached animator Nicos Livesey who has previously made a film using machine embroidered panels 

The result is amazing - loads of previous World Cup highlights which even a non-footie-fan like me remembers- Bobby Moore in 66, Gary Lineker, Iceland's thunderclaps, Zidane's 1998 headed goals...

The London Embroidery Studio reproduced these in 608 panels [enough to stretch the length of a football pitch] Their machines worked 23 hours a day for 3 weeks - which is amazing, over 270,000 metres of thread went into the stitching!

The panels were put together to make the clip, and a soundtrack was recorded at the quintessentially British Abbey Road Studios. Sir John Tomlinson sings an old Russian Folk tune 'Ochi Cherne ' [Dark Eyes]  The title sequence for the actual footage of match programmes will be the same tune in a different version by Sigala [aka Bruce from Norfolk] I cannot manage to upload the brilliant video about the construction of the trailer, but you can watch it if you click HERE

I love it! and I admire the commitment which has gone in to producing this. I doubt I shall watch any of the matches though [unless England or Belgium get to the final]