For the story of how and why I made this, you can read about it here. Since it's way too big to post on the web for viewing, I'm posting a breakdown of what's in it here.

 

	Intro: Part 1 The video starts with me totally abusing iMovie's "Aged Film" effects on top of footage of Winning Eleven 5 (the first PS2 WE), with a particularly ancient rendition of the theme song to the BBC's football highlights show Match of the Day playing. The players miss a succession of chances before Vieri converts, the film flips to full colour and clarity, and...
	Intro: Part 2 ...a different intro full of quick cuts of various players celebrating from WE7I (the last version featured in the video). U2's Beautiful Day plays -- the significance being that it's the theme to ITV's The Premiership show, which replaced the old Match of the Day. It tells you how long ago I started this -- since The Premiership was eventually cancelled and replaced by Match of the Day resumed!
	Winning Eleven 5 The highlights are organised by games, kicking off with WE5. I figured grouping them by games was best, since the WEs look really different (it's very jarring to watch WE5 now), but in hindsight it's not terribly balanced -- certain goals are more prevalent in certain versions, earlier games are slower, and towards the end the video is dominated solely by Liverpool and Man United goals (as opposed to goals from the likes of Leverkusen and Scotland in WE5!). But thanks to a lot of geeky preparation, I can easily re-cut it if I wanted to organise any other way...
	Commercial Break! Yeah, there are ads. I put them in because they provide a nice break between segments, but also because it's damned cool to see some of the older ads again (this picture is from the first great ad: The Heaven vs Hell match ended by Cantona's "Au Revoir!"). Among the other classics are the Nike Brazil Airport ad and Nike's The Mission. No, it's not sponsored by Nike, but I thought it'd be more cohesive if all the ads were Nike. That and adidas' ads just aren't as good.
	Michael Owen Testimonial Any goals highlight video worth its salt always includes a profile of prolific scorers of the time. Owen was the top goalscorer on the video(and by some distance), so he's the first choice here. I made it by finding a 30 second Owen profile (goals + manager talking about how good he is) on one of my old videos, importing it, then ripping out his real-life goals and replacing them with suitable goals from the video. Works surprisingly well... except when a little girl says "I like Michael Owen because he's gorgeous". Look, I couldn't find anything else, OK?
	Winning Eleven 5 Final Evolution The goals segments are pretty simple in structure. It starts with the game's title screen, then dissolves into a rapid-fire set of goals. Each goal gets two airings each (good ones get three), and there's a little graphic that says who scored it and when. Fun Fact: All but one of the goals from WE5FE came from a set piece. Don't know why.
	Winning Eleven 6 That little caption in the bottom corner? That's only a small snippet of the ridiculous amount of information I recorded about each goal. I have an Excel file with the scorer, teams, score, date, time, type, memory card, game, brief description and even WHO scored it against WHO -- where I could remember it. I remembered a surprising number of them out of the 114 goals in total. Yeah, I'm a bit sad.
	Ultimate All-Star Game In WE6, we decided to create replicas of ourselves and put them on an All-Star team. Everyone picked a player they liked (I took Owen), and we altered their appearance to resemble ourselves while keeping their stats so we'd remain competitive. This segment shows us playing a mock All-Star game against real players. This was the biggest hit among my friends, since most of them forgot about this and clever editing made it really funny, but naturally it's lost on anyone else.
	Winning Eleven 6 Final Evolution Here's where things get more interesting. The goals get flashier and the games get quicker. Incidentally, I tried a lot of "special effects" with some of these goals -- for instance, with a Totti scissor-kick here I stopped the replay, quickly did a Matrix-style rotation so you were facing the goal, then stopped and resumed it as Totti smacks it goalwards. There were a few other very simple camera movements -- slow rotates, zooms, etc -- that make very effective special effects.
	Ruud Van Nistelrooy Testimonial Same as the Owen, except (sadly) this looks a lot better. Two reasons: Firstly, I was more experienced, secondly, the source video applied a lot of crazy effects -- saturation, shakes, etc. When I applied those in turn to the WE goals, they really almost looked real. It rather strengthened my feeling that I really should have gone back and retouched the original segments with what I learned on the later ones.
	Winning Eleven 7 The music for these segments was actually pretty tough to put together. I started with "football songs" like Little Less Conversation, Three Lions and Song #2 (ironically popularised by FIFA), but it was tough to integrate them in terms of timing -- you can't just end a song halfway through. That's actually why those highlights videos use cheap techno, since you can snip that to whatever length you want. So I did that: The Propellerheads' Spybreak and On Her Majesty's Secret Service both feature.
	Winning Eleven 7 International One cool special feature I made is that I dug through all my old tapes to find snippets of commentators screaming for goals. And it's not surprising with so much to search through that some actually match the goals on the video, so I turn the volume, cue the soundbite, and let the commentary roll -- very cool effect.
	The Top Three Goals And finally, because all these videos need TOP TEN listings... the top three goals. The three were a Roberto Carlos free kick (which was amazing at the time -- first goal ever saved, actually -- but rubbish looking now), a Wiltord long shot pictured there, and a Beckham halfway line special.