Manto da Nação

The launch started with a scare. Pedro posted a cryptic story saying he was going to wear another jersey, and the fans panicked. Shortly after, the video revealed what he meant:

The riddle made headlines on the major sports portals before the explanation even came out.

The launch film, a collage of illustration, motion and archive footage, started from the relationship every fan already has with the Manto:

And then it flipped: history gets a brand-new chapter. A jersey created and chosen by the fans.

More than 8,000 designs had come in by the time entries closed.

The club's curators narrowed it down to ten finalists. And that's where another challenge began: the designs arrived in every shape and form, from professional designers to fans' rough sketches. To make the contest fair, we leveled all ten onto a standardized mockup, solving the complexity of each file case by case, until any jersey could be compared with any other.

Then each proposal had to be sold to the fans, regardless of personal taste or technical skill, showing a near-real version of a piece that didn't exist yet. Communication was organized into three fronts: explaining the process, presenting the proposals and mobilizing the vote.

Each finalist got a film of its own, built from the concept the author submitted along with the design. With generative AI, the jerseys were put on screen before they were ever stitched: Prestígio Urbano on Christ the Redeemer and on a beach chair in Copacabana, Noite Eterna under a starry sky, Urubu de Lima standing in the desert. All with the same format, the same length and the same care. One more way to level the playing field: whoever designed like a pro and whoever designed like a fan got the same showcase.

The film that opened the vote followed a strict rule: no fragment of any finalist appears before the reveal, and each of the ten gets the same screen time, the same scale and the same treatment.

With voting open, the campaign took on a collective goal. Guinness World Records issued the challenge of turning Manto da Nação into the sports jersey design contest with the largest public participation in the world. And the one who received the letter was Zico.

Zico lowers the letter and rises to the occasion:

Then Zico himself voted and called on the Nation to do the same. The record came as a consequence of the sheer scale of participation, without stealing the spotlight from the Mantos.

More than 100,000 votes, from Flamengo fans in more than 120 countries. The Guinness certificate was presented to Zico at the club's headquarters.

The launch film was made entirely with generative AI, and it started long before the first generation. A long research phase on the geoglyphs, the Nazca desert and every symbol Gluz put on the jersey became the script for a myth: Inti, the sun god; the mascapaicha; maíz, Peruvian corn; the sacred diamonds of Andean textiles; the eight-pointed star of Lima's flag; the Monumental stadium itself.

The structure of the film is the jersey. Each symbol first appears in the world, whether it's the sun rising behind the mountains, corn falling onto the earth or the weave of an ancestral textile, and then, in a hard cut, reappears on the fabric, in the exact spot it occupies in the print. When the film reaches Flamengo on the pitch in 2019 and 2025, with bullet time and drone flyovers, desert stone turns into sand, sand turns into fiber, and the vulture's line carries on over the weave until the jersey is worn by the players.

Behind it all, a 3D model of the jersey served as the base for the AI generations and the communication pieces, ensuring the jersey was the same in every scene and at every touchpoint.

Behind the film, a web in Magnific's Spaces: color, setting, scenes and jersey organized into hundreds of interlinked generations, until every scene found the right tone.

Scene direction started with the still image. Every key frame was composed and directed before it became motion, from the desert to the Monumental, from the geoglyph announcing the promise to 2019 and 2025 etched into the fabric. Art direction tied it all together with a single color grade, earthy and golden, so that scenes generated separately would read as one film. It took dozens of generations per take to reach the final cut, with dynamic editing, an epic score and voice-over.

The sales funnel kept the same tone without losing sight of the goal: Wear the jersey of millions. 45 million, to be precise. 2019 and 2025 are already on the jersey. The next number could be your order's. The Nation chose the Manto. Now all you have to choose is the size.