Football is bitter-sweet. For players and spectators alike, football can trigger all extremes of emotions. One moment you are crying the sweet tears of victory, and the next, you are weeping the bitter tears of defeat. No more so than towards the end of the season when the stakes are high and emotions drive teams forward to a victorious end or their ultimate demise. So what better way to show the emotion of football, and to mark the end of the season than to make a chocolate bar from the tears of Lionel Messi? A man who feels football more than any other man in the world.

In this 90” film we see Lionel Messi’s tears of joy and tears of despair collected and transformed into a dual chocolate bar with one side of Sweet Victory and one of Bitter Defeat - the emotions of football captured so players not only feel the game, but can also (virtually) taste it. Together with a team of engineers and industrial designers, a machine was created through which the bitterest of dark chocolate, and the sweetest of white chocolate flowed - an actual, moving, spinning, 10-meter long installation complete with conveyor belt. The brief for sound design was to capture and clearly define the two extremes of the game: bitter and sweet, happy and sad, positive and negative, whilst a rich landscape of football chants and whistles were used, crowds built and fitting commentary placed, to carry the story along. We made full use of its creative license to create individual sounds for each machine, in order to highlight the intricate details of the complex mechanisms, as well as for the various textures, liquids and gasses. A mix was achieved in which each element was present alongside the music.