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Manchester United · Premier League football club · Tourism and attractions campaign film
MANCHESTER UNITED
We met with the Manchester United media team at Old Trafford to discuss where they needed help with their content.
BRIEF
We met with the Manchester United media team at Old Trafford stadium to discuss where they needed help with their content. We discovered that the stadium & museum tour didn't have its own advertising campaign, so worked closely with producers at United to draw up an idea and storyboard for the piece.
We spent time understanding and digesting the Manchester United brand, as well as the immense history of the club. Our experience producing cinematic, narrative adverts helped us draw up a story that would target both older and younger fans, while also highlighting Manchester United's past players and achievements. Knowing the importance of song choice in a piece like this, we spent time finding the perfect track that would help drive the story. We knew that deciding this early in the project would help bring the piece together in a more coherent and emotive way.
Throughout the pre-production process, our producers worked closely with the producers at Manchester United to source the right actors that would help bring the idea to life. Having worked with a whole range of actors in recent years, we understood the importance of getting this choice right, so utilised our strong network to pick talent that we knew could deliver (such as James Whitehurst and Alexa Lee). Pre-production took roughly 2 weeks.
Manchester United — founded 1878, 20 league titles, and the largest social audience in the Premier League. One of the most recognised football clubs in the world, with a fanbase that spans generations and continents.
United's media team brought us inside Old Trafford to build a campaign their Stadium and Museum Tour had never had — a standalone promo for an attraction that, until then, leaned on the club's wider marketing. The audience: families, young adults, teenagers, schools, tourists. The objective: increase museum awareness and drive tour conversions.
The Old Trafford Stadium and Museum Tour is Manchester United's flagship year-round visitor experience — opened in 1986 as the world's first football-club museum, with roughly 300,000 visitors a year pre-pandemic. Built for three audiences in parallel: local Manchester families and schools, international tourists treating Old Trafford as a bucket-list visit, and the club's global supporter base converting digital fandom into a physical visit. McGill produced the hero film, cutdowns and supporting stills; Manchester United's in-house media team handled distribution across manutd.com booking pages, MUTV, the club's owned social channels (66M+ Instagram followers — the largest of any Premier League club) and in-stadium digital on matchdays.
01 // PRE-PRODUCTION
We met United's producers at Old Trafford to scope the gap. The Stadium and Museum Tour had no dedicated campaign of its own. We drew up the idea and storyboard alongside the club's in-house team, building a cinematic narrative that connected the weight of United's history with the families walking through the museum today — a story that landed for older fans and younger ones in the same frame.
Casting ran through our network. James Whitehurst and Alexa Lee led the family. United's producers signed off alongside ours. Two weeks, end to end.
Shot in 5K on the RED Scarlet-W. 48fps throughout — slow-motion on delivery, with the headroom to conform to 24fps in post where the cut called for it.
One day. Two locations — Ordsall Park and Old Trafford. Core crew: Director, Producers, Videographer, Photographer, plus a United producer on-site. Four actors playing a young family. The bulk of the day inside the stadium — museum, dugout, changing room, tunnel.
Edited to the storyboard. A 90-second hero, a 60-second cutdown, six social clips. Edit, mix and grade in-house.
Manchester United — a club whose media operation has its pick of any production company on earth — trusted McGill Productions to deliver the hero film for its Stadium and Museum Tour, the year-round visitor experience at the heart of the Old Trafford commercial estate.
Ryan Michael, Senior Producer at Manchester United, on the engagement: "These guys absolutely love their craft — that's reflected in their meticulous approach, creative execution, and flawless delivery."
The campaign was built as a full ecosystem rather than a single asset — a 90-second hero, a 60-second cut, and six social variants in 9:16, 16:9 and 2.35:1 — designed to run across United's owned channels (the largest social footprint in the Premier League at 66M+ Instagram followers), the club's website booking flow, and in-stadium digital. McGill's wider work in this period went on to win at the Brand Film Awards EMEA 2023, the NYX Awards 2023, Hermes Platinum 2023 and the Davey Awards 2024 — the same craft standard that earned the trust of one of the most recognised sports brands on the planet.
Most attraction promos default to feature-listing — the gift shop, the audio guide, the photo opportunity, the ticket price. The work here treats the visitor's emotional payoff as the subject instead. What a family actually buys when they book the Old Trafford tour is not a walk through a building; it is the feeling of standing where great players stood. Build the film around that feeling and the conversion follows. List the features and it doesn't.
The second lesson is about access. Most visiting crews are handed a ninety-minute window inside the public-tour route and asked to make a campaign out of it. United gave McGill the museum, the dugout, the changing room and the players' tunnel for a full shoot day. The asset is unrepeatable because the access was — and that is the production craft worth fighting for on any heritage, sports or attraction brief. Negotiate the access first; the film gets made second.
Delivered in 9:16, 16:9, and 2.35:1 cinematic widescreen.