Video of the Week: Someone’s nicked the Ballon d’Or
The Ballon d’Or has been stolen. Football’s biggest names are chasing it through London. Harry Kane’s on a motorbike. Lamine Yamal’s on a horse. Messi’s driving a bus.
Quite a departure from thanking your teammates.
This week’s pick is The Ballon d’Or Heist, a short AI film from The Blue Horizon. Just under three minutes of football rivalries, familiar faces and increasingly ridiculous ways of getting your hands on a trophy.
It’s an unofficial fan film, with AI-generated versions of the players. Nobody persuaded half the footballing world to spend an evening charging around London in dinner jackets.
The feel is familiar, though. Those big football adverts where someone took a gloriously daft idea and gave it the full cinematic treatment. Famous players, elaborate chases, little jokes for the fans. The sort of advert people actually wanted to watch.
And that’s what makes this interesting.
The technology gets your attention. The idea gives you a reason to stay. There’s something to chase, people you recognise and enough football humour (the running Vini Jr gag is worth the entry price alone) to make the whole thing worth passing on.
For anyone using AI to make content, there’s a useful lesson there. You still need to know your audience. You still need a story. And somebody still has to decide what will make people laugh.
Access to the tools is spreading quickly. Having something entertaining to do with them remains a rather useful advantage.
There’s also something refreshing about seeing all this capability put towards three minutes of cheerful nonsense. We spend enough time discussing productivity, disruption and which profession is next. Occasionally, a stolen trophy and Messi behind the wheel will do nicely.
Give it three minutes. Send it to the football fan in your life.
They’ll have an opinion on who should end up with the trophy. They always do.