Director's Works
BBC Women's Euro 2025, Names Will Be Made Nicos Livesey
Nicos Livesey's style fuses technical innovation with unique creative expression. He's a true mixed media specialist, directing multi-award-winning films for bands and brands like Iron Maiden, Radkey, Gorillaz, and the BBC. Whether he’s creating expansive 2D odysseys, psychedelic claymation head trips, or intricate stop-motion masterpieces animated from hundreds of individually woven tapestry frames, Nicos is a director who constantly pushes the boundaries to mind-bending effect.
For the BBC’s UEFA Women’s Euros 2025 campaign, Blinkink and director Nicos Livesey embraced a deeply handcrafted, claymation approach to capture the dynamic energy of elite women’s football, turning the brief into an action-packed world built purely from physical sculpted models and stop-motion animation rather than digital effects. Livesey’s direction leaned into the tactile, laborious nature of clay animation, assembling a team of specialist UK animators to sculpt tiny, highly detailed puppets whose faces and movements had to be resculpted frame by frame to convey recognisable players and expressive performances. The team faced classic stop-motion challenges - painstakingly adjusting expressions, choreographing physical action, and even engineering custom rigs (like a head-mounted camera setup) to capture reference moves and translate them into lively animation - all in pursuit of a vibrant, energetic aesthetic full of visual metaphors (fireball goals, twisted clay limbs) that reflect player skill and character. The craft-forward execution aligns with Blinkink and Livesey’s broader antithesis to AI-driven work - privileging physicality, texture, and human animation skill to make something as playful and spirited as the sport it celebrates.
