By the time we returned to Paris to work with Neymar Jr, the relationship between him and Superdry was already well established.
This was the second season of the partnership and the new drop was being connected into Superdry’s wider sustainability campaign, which was bringing together a number of different personalities and creative voices across the brand.
Neymar would become the next chapter in that story.
The challenge was that the circumstances around the shoot were very different from the previous year.
His football season with PSG was beginning and the amount of time we were going to have with him was significantly reduced. There was no longer the luxury of building an entire production day around one talent and working methodically through a long shot list.
Whatever we were going to make had to work inside a much tighter window.
The main sustainability campaign was being directed by Jason Evans, and rather than trying to compete with that production or create another oversized campaign around Neymar, the decision was made to approach our work differently.
We would build something that felt more immediate and observational, almost like a piece of behind-the-scenes content that happened to have the production values and visual consideration of a campaign.
That shift became important because it meant accepting what the situation genuinely gave us rather than pretending we had more control than we did.
There is always a temptation when working with high-profile talent to make the production larger simply because the name attached to it is larger.
More crew, more cameras, more equipment and more layers of approval can easily become a way of making the job feel important rather than making the work better.
I have never really believed in that.
Part of leadership for me is making sure the right people are around the project, regardless of job titles or hierarchy, and then giving those people enough space to do what they are good at.
Ego has a habit of getting in the way of that.
As somebody who is a huge football and sports fan, I was obviously excited about the opportunity to work with Neymar. It would have been very easy to approach the job with the mentality that because I was leading film internally, I needed to be the person doing everything.
But the job was never about me being able to say I had shot Neymar.
It was about making the strongest work we could in the time we had.
James Camp was an obvious person to have alongside me.
We had already worked together extensively and had developed a way of working where neither of us needed to protect territory. We could move between ideas, camera positions and practical decisions very quickly because there was trust underneath it.
That became especially valuable on this production.
When your access to somebody like Neymar is limited, every unnecessary conversation costs you time.
You cannot spend ten minutes debating who owns a shot or whether somebody is stepping outside a job title. You need people around you who can understand the idea quickly, react to what is happening in front of them and make decisions without turning every moment into a committee meeting.
The setup therefore stayed deliberately small.
Rather than building a large conventional unit, we worked in a much more fluid way around the main campaign, capturing Neymar between the larger setups and looking for moments that felt natural rather than overly constructed.
That changed my role as well.
I was not simply directing from a monitor or standing outside the action. I was moving between co-direction, shooting as second DP and thinking ahead to how the material would eventually work together in post-production.
In situations like that, the separation between production roles becomes much less important than understanding what the finished piece needs.
If I could see a moment that needed capturing, I wanted to be able to pick up a camera and get it.
If James saw something from another position, he could react immediately.
If the rhythm of the day changed because Neymar needed to move into the next campaign setup, we could adapt with it rather than asking the production to stop while we reorganised ourselves.
That flexibility was probably the most important part of the job.
High-profile talent changes the energy of a set.
There are more people around, more stakeholders, more pressure on time and a very understandable awareness that the person in front of the camera has commitments that extend far beyond your production.
You have to respect that without allowing it to make the work timid.
For me, that meant being prepared before Neymar arrived, understanding what we genuinely needed and removing anything from the process that was not helping us get there.
The smaller footprint helped.
We were not constantly moving large amounts of equipment or asking for complicated resets. We could work around what was already happening, use the energy of the main production and concentrate on the details, expressions and moments that made the material feel closer to Neymar rather than simply another polished celebrity campaign.
Post-production then became another important part of the process.
Because the footage had been gathered in a much more observational way, the edit needed to find structure and rhythm without making those moments suddenly feel over-produced.
The balance was in keeping the immediacy of what we had captured while still making sure the final output sat comfortably within Superdry’s wider campaign world.
That is something I have always enjoyed about being involved across both production and post.
You begin making editorial decisions while you are still shooting.
You start understanding which moments will carry the piece, where you might need a transition, which details are becoming important and which things that felt significant on set probably will not matter once everything is on a timeline.
Having that perspective during the shoot meant we could make more informed decisions inside an already compressed window.
Looking back, the Neymar job reinforced something that has become increasingly important to the way I lead creative teams.
The best person for the job should be the person doing the job.
Titles should help people understand responsibility, but they should never become walls around capability.
If somebody next to me can make a particular part of the work better than I can, my responsibility is not to protect my position. It is to put them in the position where they can make the work better.
That does not make leadership smaller.
It makes the output stronger.
The shoot also reminded me that scale is not the same thing as quality.
We were working with one of the most recognisable footballers in the world, but the solution was not to build the biggest production possible around him.
The solution was to understand the limitation, reduce the footprint, surround the problem with people we trusted and create a way of working that could react quickly when the opportunity was there.
In many ways, the restriction gave the piece its character.
The work felt more personal because we could not over-engineer every moment.
We had to observe, react and trust our instincts.
And for me, that is probably the biggest thing I took away from the production.
Creative leadership is not about being the person who gets to do everything.
It is about understanding what the work needs, putting the right people around it and then having enough confidence to let everybody contribute properly.
