Where digital meets the dirt

Starring Messi … and Messi?

Four-time UEFA Champions League winner and Mastercard brand ambassador Lionel Messi co-stars with a younger version of himself in a new AI-driven short film about his passion for football. With a visual effects technique called neural rendering, thousands of photos, videos and sound data of Messi’s likeness and movements are fed into an AI platform, along with videos of similar-looking actors, to generate the digital images integrated into the film's live action shots. The final version, Messi tells Priceless.com, “gave me goosebumps to see me interacting with my younger self.”