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Monday, 27 February 2006 | Levent OZLER
New Nike Shoes get Vehicle Personas
in Tronic Studio Campaign for AKQA
Continuing a three-year collaboration with Nike, creative collective Tronic Studio teamed with interactive agency AKQA/San Francisco on a trio of 15-second all-CG spots for Nike's branded "Flight," "Uptempo" and "Force" basketball shoes, for Asian broadcast and retail point-of-sale use.
Last year Tronic crafted a series of innovative Web animations to showcase the new Nike Air Jordan XX; previously the studio worked with Nike on their featured products on http://www.Nikelab.com and, as part of the Nike Speed campaign, directed and animated a fully-CG short film, "A Long Time Ago, Tomorrow," which documented one man's attempt to travel at the speed of light.
"Our work with AKQA extends our relationship with Nike in exciting new directions," says Tronic Studio creative director Jesse Seppi. "When we started working with Nike we represented the shoes' architecture in CG, then last year we used motion capture to animate the Air Jordan XXs. For the three new branded shoes our brief was to show Flight, Uptempo and Force role-playing as various vehicles. The challenge was to maintain the integrity of the shoes, not to transform them into CG vehicles."
To do that, the spots were conceived with dynamic metaphors that communicate the attributes of the vehicles and the attitudes of different styles of court play. For Flight, the shoe mimics Vertical Takeoff and Landing (VTL) aircraft as it begins to levitate from the court, and, as smoke and flames build, it rockets away, banks and rotates leaving a fiery trail. In Uptempo, the shoe appears out of the darkness in a blur, racing like a motorcycle. It maneuvers across a vast expanse of court, pops a wheelie on its heel and streaks away as it peels-out a rubber cloud that spreads across the screen in its wake. For Force, distant lights signal the arrival of the shoe, in the guise of a tank, which rides over a deflated basketball, leads a convoy of five more shoes, and is then viewed through a neon-green nightvision scope, to the accompaniment of sporadic flashes of gunfire.
"We studied reference footage for all the vehicles to get a good understanding of the physics behind each one," notes Tronic executive producer Vivian Rosenthal.
"We had to take the most dynamic and aggressive movements of each vehicle and exaggerate them to get across the idea that the shoes could be a VTL vehicle, a motorcycle or a tank, without actually transforming the shoes themselves," Seppi explains.
Working to evocative sound-effects scratch tracks they created, Seppi tapped Autodesk's 3ds Max v.8 to fashion an infinite basketball court with a highly-reflective surface. Tronic sculpted each shoe in Max using pelt mapping to unwrap and stretch the models flat for 2D painting then rewrap them. They used Z Brush for detail work and added camera shake to the court for Flight's high-powered takeoff and multi-pass motion blur to demonstrate Uptempo's speed. After Burn provided the spots' atmospheric effects; Brazil was their choice for rendering.
"This was our first time working with AKQA, and we think it's the start of a wonderful relationship," says Seppi.
Adds Rosenthal, "While we're known for our complex CG work for Nike we are crossing over into mix live-action with them for Nike Soccer." Seppi traveled to London to shoot soccer star Thierry Henri, in a pure live-action environment.
The strength of Tronic Studio lies in its ability to leverage the various backgrounds of its four partners as architects, designers, art directors and directors to establish a collective fusing of ideas, images, movement and experience.
By actively shaping all projects though a rigorous conceptual process, we transcend preconceived notions of how to arrive at a particular creative solution within any of the media in which we work. Ultimately, by privileging our ideas and promoting ourselves as thought leaders we offer ourselves the flexibility to work in broadcast, from, print, the Internet and the built environment. Clients include: MTV, Fuse, Nike Diesel, Wired, RES, NEC, GE., and more.
Tronic Studio: http://www.dexigner.com/directory/detail/5258/
AKQA: http://www.dexigner.com/directory/detail/5015/
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