The answer turned out to be 900 years old.
Most World Cup content starts with the players: squad announcements, training montages, hype reels. I wanted to start with the badge. 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 back to Richard the Lionheart, who used them to represent his three titles: 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 pitch. Richard raises his shield on a battlefield. The three golden heraldic lions leap off it, turn into photorealistic animals and play the game of their lives. At the end all three run side by side toward the camera as the England crest fades in around them, the lions dissolving back into the badge they've always been.
The whole film plays to God Save the King. It ends on 'Happy and Glorious': a line from the anthem, the words printed inside the collar of England's 2026 Nike home shirt, and the title card the film has been building to. Once that triple meaning was found, everything else organised itself around it.
Each lion maps to one of Richard's titles, 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 can't win without.
The antagonists are jaguars throughout: sleek, spotted, relentless, and nothing like the lions.
The AI workflow ran in five stages, each tool doing the job it's actually built for. Midjourney generated the hero shots: Richard, the lions in action, the battlefield, the stadium. Nano Banana Pro and ChatGPT Image 2 then built character reference sheets that fixed each lion's face, build and colouring. Those sheets went back into Midjourney for the storyboard frames, and Seedance 2.0 animated them.
Animation took the most iteration. Transformations and complex spatial shots often meant going back to Midjourney, rebuilding the still with cleaner geometry and feeding it in again. After Effects stitched the footage, graded the film and added sound and music.
Come on England. Happy and Glorious. 🏴
