Responses by Lucas Nikitczuk, founder and chief executive officer, /nk.studio.

Background: During the World Cup, we started feeling that perhaps we were watching Lionel Messi’s final World Cup with Argentina. After so many years of following him, suffering and celebrating with him, we wanted to give something back—a small gesture in return for an enormous amount of joy. Therefore, The Last Tango was born as a gift for Our Captain.

Larger picture: There was no client, brief, product or campaign behind it. It was an independent initiative that emerged inside /nk.studio through conversations after the matches. We didn’t want to explain who Messi was or summarize his career; we simply felt the moment deserved something, and we wanted to make it.

Design core: The central idea was millions of points reconstructing Messi’s goals. We could have built a beautiful video gallery, but that would have shown what Messi did. We wanted to represent how he made people feel. The goals were his; the emotion belonged to millions. Each point symbolically represents one of those people, while a very minimal interface keeps the focus on the goals, commentary and emotion.

Favorite details: What makes us proudest is simply that we made the website. The studio was already full of projects, deadlines and meetings, and nobody asked us to do this. We had to make space for it because we wanted it to exist. Every time we go back into the site, it still makes us emotional. It reminded us how wonderful it is to make something simply because you are in love with an idea.

Challenges: Transforming conventional football footage into something people could experience spatially. We separated each video into layers, isolating subjects, generating masks and estimating depth so we could reconstruct the footage inside WebGL. The harder part was making sure the technology never became the point. It still had to feel emotional.

Time constraints: We worked on the project for around ten days while the World Cup was still happening. Every time Argentina won, we had a few more days to finish the gift. The design, 3-D design and development had to evolve together, with prototypes quickly becoming production solutions. That urgency became part of the project’s energy.

New lessons: We learned about point clouds, video processing, depth estimation, AI-assisted computer vision and real-time WebGL. But the most important lesson was that none of those technologies were the starting point. We started with an emotion and a question: How could we represent what Messi made millions of people feel? The technology came afterwards as a way to answer it.

Special technical features: We wanted to preserve the original footage rather than re-create the goals as traditional 3-D scenes. We processed the videos into chromas, masks, subjects and depth maps from which we reconstructed flat images inside WebGL with control over depth, position and movement. The original pixels remain visible, preserving the texture and imperfections of the broadcast footage, but they now exist in three-dimensional space.