MPC makes tongue-in-cheek ad for Juventus’ new Palace and Adidas collaborative kit

Moving Picture Company has created a short film to celebrate the launch of a collaborative football kit by Juventus, Palace and Adidas. Called Shared Goals, the ad was shot in Turin over two days, and riffs on the idea that both footballers and skaters, despite being very different athletes, have a few key things in common.

Starting off as a bombastic take on Juventus’ history, complete with an opera soundtrack and emotive and effusive voiceover, the film’s narrator espouses passion and pride in the club’s heritage in Italian with retro-style English subtitles. Half way through the film, however, the tone changes to something more playful in keeping with Palace’s humorous approach to advertising. At first the shared goals of the club and the skateboarding brand are predictable things like “glory” and “a place in history” but later switch to the more tongue-in-cheek: a “nice bit of kit” and “lovely hair”.

MPC has been making films for the 10-year-old, London-based skate brand for four years and for this project was tasked with bringing an existing script to life visually. Choosing to shoot the skateboarders and footballers separately, as they train in the streets and at the stadium, the final scene features them coming together in a faux team talk complete with flip chart.

“The way we work with [Palace], none of it is traditional,” says MPC head of creative development Richard Skinner, of working with the young, disruptive brand. “It’s not like you’re dealing with hardened commercial directors. The biggest challenge is helping them be them, while fitting into a production format that all the other clients and people involved are used to dealing with.” While the creative directors at Palace favour a more spontaneous approach, any large collaboration brings creatives into the fold that may prefer to storyboard and scout locations in advance. Part of MPC’s role is to ease conflict between these two ways of working, Skinner tells It’s Nice That. “It’s sort of like herding cats.”

One of the biggest challenges MPC faced with this particular ad was the limited time the film team had with the famous players, spending just 45 minutes shooting them around the stadium. As well as the challenge of working with stars not used to acting, each player also had a manager both club side and from Adidas overseeing the process, and there were limits on what MPC could film them doing.

Luckily the natural chemistry between the skateboarders, crew and players made for a smooth shoot, despite all the caveats in place. “Palace and their team are like a family and there’s no egos,” says Skinner. “They’re all friends so when you’re working with them, you see it on whoever’s involved, whether it’s us, Adidas or Juventus. It’s down to them being just this open, fun normal bunch of people so when the footballers do sit down with the skaters in that last shot, all the guys are absolutely lovely – total sweethearts – and you just think, ’All right this is this is going to be easy.’”

The new kit was unveiled on 30 October at Juventus’ game against Genoa, with the film and sales of the kit both launching on 8 November. The kit, which features the team’s black and white colours plus accents of neon green, sold out in less than 12 hours.