The past and present collide as Muhammad Ali gets into the ring with his boxer daughter Laila Ali in the :60 "Laila," a new adidas spot created by 180, Amsterdam, and TBWA Worldwide, New York, and directed by Lance Acord of Park Pictures, New York, with visual effects produced by Digital Domain, Venice, Calif.
"Laila" is part of a multi-spot campaign directed by Acord (the director previously helmed the adidas ad "Wake-Up Call," which helped earn him a nomination for the Directors Guild of America Award as best commercial director of 2003) that brings together athletes from past and present through the use of visual effects. For example, another spot in the campaign that also recently broke, "The Long Run," seamlessly melds current footage of a new generation of athletes—including Laila, soccer star David Beckham and swimmer Ian Thorpe—with footage of Muhammad Ali on his morning training run in Zaire in ’74. If you didn’t know any better, you might think that the athletes of today had really accompanied Ali on that famous jog.
While "The Long Run" is an impressive spot, "Laila" is the campaign’s true knockout thus far. It is simply amazing to see Ali in the ring with his daughter. "Muhammad Ali shattered people’s ideas of what was possible in boxing, then along comes his daughter," said 180 executive creative director Peter McHugh, explaining the thinking behind the commercial. "While she may not be the World Champion Male Heavyweight, she has taken female boxing to another level, informed and inspired by what her dad did. This spot is trying to tap into that."
As "Laila" opens, we see a young Ali gliding through a cheering crowd and into a boxing ring. Then, Laila makes her way to the ring. The fight begins, and Ali moves like a butterfly, ducking and weaving to avoid Laila’s punches.
During the fight, we hear Laila in voiceover. "Impossible isn’t a fact. It’s an opinion," she says. "Like when they said it’d be impossible to beat Sonny Liston. He’s too powerful, too experienced. Or when they said, don’t take the fight to Zaire. He’s too young, too strong. He’s gonna destroy Ali. So when my father looks impossible in the eye and defeats it, again and again, what do you think I’m gonna do when they say women shouldn’t box? Yeah, that’s right. Rumble, young girl, rumble."
While a clear victor isn’t revealed in the Ali vs. Ali fight, Laila does land a blow to her father’s side, sending him spiraling backward into the ropes. He looks at her with his mouth open, clearly stunned. The boxers retreat to their respective corners, and as Laila sits down, she gives her father a look as if to teasingly say, "Got ya!" Cut to Muhammad, who winks at his daughter. The spot ends with a super of adidas’ new tagline: "Impossible is nothing."
A DIGITAL UNION
The effects work in "Laila" is extensive, but Ed Ulbrich, Digital Domain’s senior VP of production/executive producer, stressed, "The visual effects—while there are many, and they are very advanced—are not evident effects. Nobody is going to look at this [spot] and have any idea how much work we did, which is a good thing because the effects are there to support the story."
The first step in making "Laila" was finding and obtaining old fight footage of Ali in his prime. Susan Nickerson, owner of Nickerson Research, Los Angeles, was the stock footage researcher. Ultimately, footage of Ali was taken from fights he had with Cleveland Williams and Ernie Terrell that took place in Houston in the ’60s within a few months of each other, according to Acord.
Fred Raimondi, Digital Domain’s visual effects supervisor, noted that Nickerson and 180 producer Cedric Gairard were able to provide Digital Domain with the original films. "I’ve done one hundred of these stock footage jobs, and you never get the film. You always get the video transfer," Raimondi said. "But Susan and Cedric got every piece of film, and we were able to scan everything ourselves for cinema." The spot is running in theaters in Europe.
With the footage in hand, Acord headed into the editing room with editor Eric Zumbrunnen of Spot Welders, Venice, to piece together what would become a roadmap of sorts. Once the backplates were cut, Acord and Raimondi were able to figure out how best to shoot Laila’s and an Ali body double’s portion of the spot. "Once you have that edit, you know where you’re putting her in the shots, and then the real work begins with figuring out timing and cadences and lining up the angles of the shots and the correct focal lengths," Acord related.
Laila and Ali’s body double—a fighter from Miami—were shot on 35mm in front of a green screen on a stage at The Lot, Hollywood, over three days last summer. There had been some discussion of shooting the new footage on 16mm since the old Ali footage was shot on 16mm, but Acord went with 35mm. "There was going to be so much compositing done that we wanted the highest quality, sharpest negative we could possibly have," Acord explained.
PUNCH PERFECT
On the set, Acord, who also DPed the spot, found that the biggest challenge was choreographing Laila’s actions. Essentially, she was required to mimic the moves of the fighter seen in the original footage doing battle with Ali. "If he threw three left-hand jabs and then a right hand cross, she’s throwing those same punches," Acord said.
Raimondi came up with a way to help her get into the swing of things. Prior to the shoot, Raimondi produced a soundtrack of sorts, punctuated with snare drum hits at the extension of the punches Terrell and Williams threw in the original fight footage with Ali. Laila was instructed to follow the beat, matching her punches with the snare drum hits.
Once footage of Laila and the Ali body double was shot, it went back to Zumbrunnen. "He had to take the footage and back it into the cuts that there already were," Raimondi said. "When Eric was done, we had a finished edit, and that was our template for the final compositing."
When it came to the compositing, the hardest part of the job was removing Ali’s original opponent and his opponent’s ring crew from the old footage, according to Raimondi. The painstaking compositing work went on from October through this past January. "I’m jaded about this stuff, but it was getting to the point at the end where I was looking at the shots, and I would have to remind myself, ‘Oh yeah, Laila wasn’t there. We had to put her in there,’ " Raimondi said.
While Raimondi and everyone else involved in the making of "Laila" was thrilled, the ultimate judge was Ali, who had final approval over "Laila" and the rest of the spots. His reaction? "By all accounts, Ali and his wife Lonnie loved them," McHugh reported.
