Top running coaches often have their athletes train barefoot–running barefoot strengthens the feet as well as the knees and the hips. But unless you happen to live in a beachfront home in say Malibu, running barefoot is not a practical option for most of us. With that in mind, Nike created Nike Free, a shoe that simulates the experience of running barefoot–in fact, a runner wearing the shoes while jogging down city streets might even get swept away into fantasyland, imagining himself running on the beach.
And that’s exactly what happens in “Run Barefoot” (:30). Directed by Noam Murro of Biscuit Filmworks, Los Angeles, for Wieden+Kennedy (W+K), Portland, Ore., the spot recreates the epic beach scene from 1981’s Chariots of Fire–complete with Vangelis’ Oscar-winning instrumental “Titles (Main Theme).”
You know the scene. It’s the one in which a pack of athletes heroically run down a beach. In “Run Barefoot,” however, the runners encounter various obstacles during their beach run, including a parking meter, bench and ultimately a bus, which cuts across their path.
Cut to the city, where the lead runner from the beach is running solo, stuck at a stoplight as a bus zooms by. The glorious beach scene was just in his imagination.
While the spot cleverly communicates what it feels like to wear the Nike Free shoe through an association with an iconic film scene, W+K art director Monica Taylor, who created the spot with copywriter Derek Barnes, admitted that–at least at the outset of the project–she and her partner had concerns about whether the Chariots of Fire reference might be too cliché. But the more they thought about it, the more they realized that no other pop culture reference has the same resonance with runners. “Bicyclists have Breaking Away, boxers have Rocky and runners have Chariots of Fire,” Taylor mused.
The key to making the spot work was in the execution. “Of all the [directors] we looked at, Noam had the best sense of the pitfalls of this–how it could be done badly,” Taylor said. “Our mutual fears were that it wouldn’t be sincere, that it would be a joke, that it wouldn’t be as beautiful and as moving as the film and that the comedy wouldn’t be subtle.”
“It needed to feel authentic, and at the same time have a magical quality to it,” Murro explained. “I didn’t go for laughs for sure. I was going for this weird place in between reality and imagination. This lives in somebody’s head obviously, and [the challenge was]–how do you pull it off in its most direct, simple way?”
UP TO SPEED
Determined to capture most everything in-camera and not rely on effects (Method Studios, Santa Monica, did some work on the bus swipe), Murro and DP Ellen Kuras–“One of our points of reference was Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and Ellen was the DP [for that film],” Taylor noted–shot “Run Barefoot” on location over the course of a day and a half. One day was spent shooting at Pismo Beach, Calif. where one of the primary challenges was ensuring that the props–including the aforementioned parking meter and bench–stayed anchored in place as the tide came in.
With the props firmly in place, Murro spent the day running a pack of athletes–including actor/runner Todd Witzleben in the lead role and runners Alan Webb, Dathan Ritzenhein and Adam Goucher–ragged. “Their feet were literally bleeding at the end of the day,” Murro shared.
“The miracle of the [beach] shoot is that we got an overcast day from beginning to end, which doesn’t ever happen,” Taylor remarked. Having an overcast day was a positive, Taylor said, in that it resulted in film that looked as though it was shot in Scotland, where the classic Chariots of Fire beach scene was shot.
Once the beach shoot was completed, the city scenes were shot in half a day in downtown Los Angeles. The challenge that day was orchestrating a complicated camera move so that the shot of the bus whizzing by the runner in the city would match the previous shot in the spot of the bus whizzing by the runner on the beach.
Editor Avi Oron of Bikini Edit, New York, traveled to Portland to cut “Run Barefoot.” “The edit was all about subtleties, nuance and grace,” Taylor said, “and Avi added a lot of grace. We knew what the order of the sots would be, we knew what the crescendo would be, but sometimes the pearls don’t go on the string in the right order, and Avi has a lovely touch.”