The story behind the BBC’s remarkable World Cup trailer begins some time ago, with a 12-year-old on a day trip to a boat show becoming entranced by an embroidery machine. Many years later the boy, now working in animation and also the singer and guitarist in a rock band, produced a Kickstarter-funded, Channel 4-backed fully embroidered animated video for one of their songs. It was, he says, “the most ridiculously stupid idea”, one that took seven months to bring to life. Four years later, the BBC called.

“That video was such a passion project, totally just doing it for the love of it,” Nicos Livesey says now. “So to be able to take it further on, to be able to do it for such an amazing event and with the whole world watching, for this opportunity to come off the back of something like that was super exciting for me.”

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The latest chapter in this story was opened last September, when the BBC’s in-house creative agency, BBC Creative, put out a call for World Cup-related ideas. Two members of their team, Edward Usher and Xander Hart, immediately got to work. “The brief was to talk about the global impact the World Cup has and its cultural significance,” says Usher. “It’s a celebration of football, but we wanted to go beyond that. So we started researching Russian history.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Gary Lineker is recreated in tapestry for the launch film for the BBC’s 2018 World Cup marketing campaign. Photograph: BBC Sport/BBC Creative

The pair came up with 20 proposals, the best of which were among 68 put in front of the BBC Creative’s creative directors, James Cross and Tim Jones, at the end of 2017. There was one based on Russian sculpture, a variety of live-action ideas, and one that proposed to make a film out of tapestries. “Tapestries have been used by different cultures throughout history,” says Hart. “We looked at a lot of Russian art and they had some amazing tapestries and embroidery.”

This all seems like considerably more thought than was once given to World Cup title sequences, which for a long time appeared to be little more than hastily patched-together amalgams of slow-motion celebrating footballers and the most obvious host-nation cliches, while trailers scarcely existed at all. But then came 1990, and Nessun Dorma.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The BBC’s opening credits for the 1990 World Cup.

Italia 90 is viewed as something of a watershed in the history of Britain’s relationship with the tournament and football in general, but the first sign that something unusual was going on came at the end of the first week of the tournament, when Luciano Pavarotti’s rendition of Puccini’s aria, the soundtrack to the BBC’s opening credits and the antithesis of the kind of music generally popular at the time – New Kids on the Block and Adamski were in the top 10 that week – hit the charts. By the second week it was at No 3, and it remained in the top three for the remainder of the tournament.

If this was the moment when credits and trailers for sporting events turned from necessity to opportunity, the bar has been raised many times since. Perhaps most notable was Channel 4’s Paralympic campaign in 2012, Meet the Superhumans, and the 2016 sequel, We’re the Superhumans. What we are now enjoying is an arms race between rival broadcasters and their creative teams.

“The BBC has a great history of pushing things that are artistic anyway,” says Usher. “I think they should do the same in their marketing campaigns. There’s a lot of faith in BBC Creative to make standout promos. When people are talking about the film, and they’re amazed that it’s embroidered, it’s doing a better job of promoting the World Cup on the BBC. The story of the film as well as the film itself is promoting the offer.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘An amazing machine living in space’ – the tapestry machine from the BBC’s trailer for the 2018 World Cup, inspired by Soviet bus stops. Photograph: BBC Sport/BBC Creative

Early this year the pair’s embroidery idea was commissioned. They moved quickly to recruit Livesey, the only person known to have made an animated film out of embroidery (not the craziest medium he’s used: he animated one advert entirely with icing). He did further work on the aesthetic: the character designs are informed by Russian mosaics, the backgrounds by Soviet era poster art, and the tapestry machine that starts and ends the film by a particularly niche subset of Russian architecture. “The machine is a sort of concept embroidery machine,” says Livesey. “I was looking at old Russian bus stops and their amazing concrete geometric shapes, so we created an amazing machine living in space that turns on whenever the World Cup’s on and stitches out its most amazing moments and then sleeps again for another four years.”

Gradually a longlist of moments to be immortalised was whittled down. Usher and Hart’s earliest World Cup memories are from 1998, which is why Zinedine Zidane’s headed goals from that year’s final make an appearance (Dennis Bergkamp’s famous wonderstrike against Argentina was one of the moments that did not make the cut), while the inclusion of Iceland’s thunderclaps, coming before the country’s World Cup debut, was a more left field suggestion.

“There were many moments that we wanted to try, but we wanted to get some imagery in it that wasn’t just constant goals, goals, goals,” says Livesey. “Iceland’s thunderclaps are such a powerful thing, the image of them charging on their way, parting the seas to Russia. It just seemed a really nice way to get something different in there.”

The video was animated on computer, and then each of the 600 frames machine stitched at the London Embroidery Studio over a period of three weeks in April. “They were a bit under the cosh,” says Usher. “I think they had all their machines running 23 hours a day.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The launch film for the BBC’s 2018 World Cup marketing campaign.

Usher and Hart’s other significant task was to find the perfect soundtrack. After an inevitably exhaustive period of research – “We had to trawl through an absolute gamut of Russian music, starting in Gregorian chants up to modern music, everything under the sun,” says Usher – they eventually settled upon a Russian folk song called Ochi Chernye, or Dark Eyes, and recorded a bespoke version at Abbey Road, sung in Russian by Sir John Tomlinson (a very different version of the same tune, by the DJ Sigala, will soundtrack the BBC’s World Cup title sequence). “Nessun Dorma was really made famous by the fact it was on the BBC in 1990, and that was what we wanted to achieve: find our version of that,” says Hart. “We really feel this has the necessary emotion.” The likes of Drake and Dua Lipa can consider themselves warned.