The night before England manager Thomas Tuchel named his 26-man World Cup squad was a nervous one.Not so much for the players: by then, most of them had already received the phone call telling them whether they were in or out. But for those responsible for producing the squad announcement video that the English Football Association (FA) wanted to go live at 10am the next morning.“The last name we got was Ivan Toney,” says Keane Pearce Shaw, who directed the film along with his business partner Pete Martin.The duo, who run creative agency Dirty Vanilla, had spent the previous three weeks working night and day on the project, from shooting the main running sequence on one of New York’s busiest streets, to tasking staff with creating hand-drawn animations and designers with computer-generated imagery (“zero AI was used,” Shaw points out). But there was only so much they could do without Tuchel’s final list of names, which landed with them around 7pm the night before the film was due to go live.“It was really nuts,” says Shaw. “For all the challenges that you get of making everyone happy with the storyboards, where we’re going to shoot it, what the message is, what the track is, what the creative is, you’ve got that massive, massive hurdle at the end to actually get this out within about 12 hours from receiving the final squad list to the 10am launch time. It was a bit of a head scramble, to be honest.”Shaw and Martin directed the England kit launch video earlier this year, which featured English singer/songwriter and frontman of The Streets, Mike Skinner, narrating a poem written by Shaw to the backdrop of beats produced by British record producer, Fred Again. It was so well received that the FA asked if they would do the squad announcement too. Oh, and by the way, there was a chance that The Beatles might be involved.“That was something that was running along in the background,” says Shaw. “When they first reached out, they said, ‘We don’t know which way this is going to go, but there could be a chance that The Beatles are involved.’ And I was like, well, that makes it a bit more interesting, doesn’t it?”It also presented challenges. “Not only have you got 26 players now to sort of appease,” says Shaw. “You’ve got the FA, and also now you’ve one of the biggest bands ever to grace the planet.”The directors made it their mission to create something that appealed to devotees of football and The Beatles — no easy task.The first job was to choose which Beatles track they would use. Shaw and Martin were keen on the upbeat vibes of A Hard Day’s Night. They’d spent time working on various sports projects in the US last year and had fond memories of finding themselves in “weird and wonderful places in America — little honky-tonk bars and dive bars and random fields in the middle of Texas”. They pictured England fans in cowboy hats, potentially tops off, line dancing in Middle America, and their minds immediately pictured a fast-paced, vignette-based film that followed a few cast England fans in these environments.The FA had concerns over some of the lyrics (“Working like a dog,” for one, which they worried could be used in relation to certain individuals). Its preference was for Come Together, which it felt represented the spirit of unity that England engenders at a World Cup (or should do, at least).Creatively, that was tricky.“It’s quite slow, it’s quite pensive, it takes a while to get going, and other than the come together message, there wasn’t much going on,” Shaw observes. “There was something in it that felt quite brooding and quite cocky, in a way.”They thought about what visual would go with that; one that wasn’t happy-go-lucky but creates a mood and becomes iconic on its own. It led to them creating what Shaw describes as an “epic, slow-motion running shot, where you’re watching this thing play out and it takes you to a place quite slowly, but epically at the same time”.The next challenge was where to shoot it. New York was expensive but also carried (some) relevance. “All being well, we get to the final and that’s where it’s going to be,” smiles Shaw, referring to the MetLife Stadium (albeit it is located in New Jersey, not New York).Shaw and Martin wanted to film on Jamaica Avenue — one of New York’s busiest streets — with their cast running past shop fronts renamed as England players and yellow cabs with their names printed on the roof signs. The street was even closed down for a few minutes to allow them to get the shot required.That shoot wrapped on Friday, one week before the film was released.What of the player names, then? Although they didn’t receive the confirmed list of 26 until the night before the launch, Shaw says that earlier in the process he, Martin and the FA put their heads together and “had a good guess at who Thomas (Tuchel) might take, plus a long list of around 10 extra names”.Some, you can tell, were inserted relatively confidently in advance: Declan Rice appears on a pair of cowboy boots, Morgan Rogers on the back pocket of some denim shorts, and Jude Bellingham on an England shirt worn by a woman dancing in a bar.Not that anything was guaranteed. Arsenal still had two Premier League games and a Champions League final to play. “Who knows, Rice could have got injured and then that whole scene was absolutely screwed,” says Shaw.On the day of the shoot, they filmed 40-plus names: “All different versions of all different inserts,” says Shaw. “When you watch the video you’ll see photography moments that were reminiscent of Beatlemania in the 60s; we used those insert moments to break away from the one shot and insert the names that we just didn’t know were going to go in (the squad).”They replicated posters made for the Beatles in the 60s and created six to 10 for the defenders, allowing them to be slotted in at the last minute. “The trick for us was to make sure that we had a few moments where we could insert the night before the thing went live.”The hand-drawn animations were the only aspect that could be started before the shoot took place. As Shaw points out, two weeks does not give much time to create them. There are two in the film: the first a play on the music video for Yellow Submarine and the second on the Come Together video.“They’re the ones that we could create with name placeholders on the umbrellas and within the animated Yellow Submarine world (below). Names in there like (Jarell) Quansah, Jordan Henderson, Kobbie Mainoo, Ivan Toney — they all lived within that world. They were the last names that were put on the team sheet, so the animation was in there, not only to look cool and to reference The Beatles, but to save my ass a little bit, because I could insert the names at the last minute.”Setting the tone for the entire film is the opening clip of John Lennon being interviewed in America.“Do you think you’re very English?” the Beatles singer is asked.“I think we’re jolly English actually,” he replies, swapping his Liverpudlian accent for “the Queen’s English,” with a hint of mischief in his eyes.Shaw and Martin found the clip while watching documentaries of The Beatles in America as part of their research, and that line immediately stood out. “I knew I wanted to open with that clip. It made me laugh, but it was also obviously taking the p*** a bit. I feel like one thing we do really well as English people is take the p***.”As soon as the creative process and conversations with The Beatles started, Shaw raised the idea of using it in the film. “It was touch and go whether we could,” he says, “but I think it sets the film up so perfectly with how it is and how he is. Rather than a cheesy quote, I love that it’s a bit cheeky. It’s exactly how England fans are, right?”The night before the film’s release was intense. “There were multiple iterations of it that got swapped and changed numerous times,” says Shaw. “There was the odd spelling mistake, The Beatles wanted to change the colour of this thing, and that player’s not going to go in. It really was a massive team effort.”At 9.25 on the morning of the squad announcement, 35 minutes before it was set to go live, Shaw’s team handed over the final version to the FA. The reaction to it has been overwhelmingly positive since — more so than the actual squad announced within it.“It went insane,” says Shaw. “I was quite shocked, really, at how well it was received and how global it went.“We know how pessimistic England fans, and I suppose the country, can be at the best of times. With any of my films or with anything in football, it’s trying to find the right balance with it, and trying to find a place where you’re not opening yourself up to absolute slaughter online.“It’s about finding that sweet spot visually and making something where anyone can watch it and go, ‘You know what? Fair f****** play.’”