UEFA Women's Euro 2025: Ignite puts fans and players front and centre with title sequence for ITV By Jo Ruddock
Tuesday, July 1, 2025 - 09:51
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Think of Switzerland, and what comes to mind? For Ignite, the creative agency arm of AE Live Group, cuckoo clocks, the Alps, mountain goats and trains that run on time were some of the iconic images that sprang to mind when the company was tasked with creating the title sequence for ITV's coverage of the UEFA Women's Euros, which begin in the country tomorrow.
As David Snowdon, creative producer at Ignite, explains: We wanted to centre a creative on a theme that was quintessential with the host country, to give viewers a sense of occasion during the tournament. So myself, Andrew Olley, Reuben Thorpe, Jens Hertzum and Jeane Lundberg did some research on Switzerland, and it's a really rich country full of things that you could hang a creative on, so very quickly we went straight to cuckoo clocks.
After a simple sketch based around the cuckoo clock concept, the Ignite team worked together to develop imagery and ideas that not only showcased the host country but also met ITV's other key aims.
He continues: We knew that we wanted to create a concept that celebrated the women's game we really wanted an idea that if this was a men's tournament, it would be the same concept. And we wanted to put the players and the fans front and centre in a playful and handcrafted way.
We wanted our sequence to be entertaining first and foremost and hopefully put a smile on people's faces. The tournament will be the most watched sporting event of the summer so we wanted to create something that would appeal to casual viewers as well as football fans and had enough detail in it to make multiple viewings constantly enjoyable.
As the concept developed, the idea was enhanced to take viewers inside an ornate cuckoo clock where they discover a magical world that's quintessentially Swiss.
I always find the best title ideas are when your whole team are so into it and coming up with ideas to make it better, Snowdon says. Then you get excitement and that carries through into the pitch process. We pitched the idea to Paul McNamara, who's executive director at ITV, and a couple of days later, I got the phone call to say we'd been successful.
A key element of the design is the ability to switch out the strips being worn by the animated players, as well as change their facial features and hair. These will be personalised for each match with the players wearing the kits of the teams that are about to play.
We wanted this to be bespoke for every broadcast that ITV are showing, so we had to make a unique title sequence for every game, he explains.
This level of detail and variety was also welcomed by ITV, especially as the graphics will be used in more than just the opening sequence.
ITV has ad breaks so you need to create a lot of break bumpers, looping backgrounds, wipes. The more assets you can give them, the better, because they're regularly going into breaks, so you need into breaks, out of breaks, and you don't want the same break bumper over and over again. We had to take our sequence apart and go, Well, this could be a break bumper that we could make for every country; this could be a wipe that we could use, that background could be a looping background for full frame graphics'.
The concept was bought to life by Ignite teams in the UK and New Zealand, including Ignite UK's Jamie Burton, motion designer (characters), and senior motion designer Kasun Ilesinghe of Ignite New Zealand. Snowdon is particularly proud of what this collaborative effort achieved.
The tournament will be the most watched sporting event of the summer so we wanted to create something that would appeal to casual viewers as well as football fans and had enough detail in it to make multiple viewings constantly enjoyable
I'm really pleased with how the team worked together and how smoothly they all made it. There were times where I wasn't quite sure how a scene would go from one point to another point and Kasun would just figure it out. How we worked as a team, with Andrew Olley and Reuben Thorpe constantly casting their creative design eyes on scenes, to everyone else involved from the creative point of view, is what I'm most proud of. Also, we really wanted to close that gender fame gap, and one thing I said in the pitch was that we wanted to create a sequence that would stand alongside the male title sequences that we've made. I really think we've done that, and I'm really excited for viewers to see it, and hopefully they react in the same way.
From a technical perspective, a multitude of tools went into creating the title sequence, as Ilesinghe explains: All the scenes were built and animated in Cinema 4D then refined and edited in Adobe After Effects. Lightning and rendering were handled entirely with RedShift and for the asset building and texturing most of the assets and characters were modelled in ZBrush with Adobe Substance Painter doing the heavy lifting on the textures. Final renders were imported into After Effects and then onto Premier Pro to marry the pictures with our composed music then exported for delivery on Frame.IO.
The team
Ignite
Creative directors Andrew Olley / Reuben Thorpe
Creative executive Jens Hertzum
Senior producers David Snowdon / Jeane Lundberg
Senior motion designer Kasun Ilesinghe
Motion designers Jamie Burton / Max Desai / Laam Kong
Graphic designer Sophie Ba
Music composer via Jim Copperthwaite at Adapted Silence
ITV
Executive director Paul McNamara
Production manager Denise Jones
Senior producer Martyn Reardon
Media manager Tim Gray
Original music was commissioned by Snowdon to accompany the imagery,
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UEFA Women's Euro 2025: Ignite puts fans and players front and centre with title sequence for ITV By Jo Ruddock 
