Sam Gilbey + NIKE Football

17 March 2026

Late last year, Sam was picked to be part of a team alongside ad agency Ultra and motion studio The Line to paint Real Madrid star Vinícius Júnior in a collage-style movie poster for the launch campaign of his exclusive forthcoming Nike football boots - the Mercurial Vapor 16 Pros. Nike had been on Sam’s hit-list of dream clients for years so this was a box-ticking no-brainer.

"Obviously I love making movie posters for real films, but making movie posters for fake movies comes in a very close second! It’s such a fun space to play in, in terms of establishing the right genre and feel with the composition, and then also using type and graphics to bring it all together. The bright pink boots, also known as ‘sunset pulse’ lent themselves to a rich deep palette of dark purples and blues.

A key challenge was the fact that the lighting we wanted to create wasn’t actually in the supplied photography of Vinícius and we didn’t have any pictures of him wearing the kit or new boots. But the team were super supportive about helping to source reference, whether it was photographing specific angles of the boots, sending general inspiration for the mood and everything else in between. The icing on the cake was the fact that Vinícius Júnior signed off his likeness first time around!”