Horses. Horses with swimmers, gymnasts, runners, judo experts—horses with everyone except … riders.
In a sunny arena, the assembled athletes pursue and gesture vainly to their equine counterparts, urging them to cooperate. Amid the confusion, a voiceover announces, "In Sydney, adidas will be involved in 26 out of the 28 sports. Who knows, maybe one day we’ll be in all of them … including equestrian."
"Horses" is one of two adidas :60s airing internationally in honor of the Olympics. (The other spot is "Boats.") Ringan Ledwidge of London-based Harry Nash directed the campaign for 180, Amsterdam.
Lorenzo de Rita, 180’s creative director/copywriter, said that the agency’s approach was not only lighthearted, but efficient: "Adidas wanted to say, ‘We are involved in this sport, and this, and this, and that…’ We thought it would be easier to talk about the two sports adidas doesn’t do at the Olympics!" More soberly, de Rita continued, "We respected the tone of adidas, which is a really human brand." The ad makes the athletes more accessible, according to Rita. "Instead of celebrating just the athletes, adidas celebrates sport. We thought it also had irony, which is an adidas quality."
Agency 180 and adidas recruited U.S. women’s soccer player Kristine Lilly and Ethiopian middle-long-distance runner Haile Gebreselassie, among others. "The idea was to get from adidas the top athletes from each sport, so that people could enjoy known faces," said de Rita. While not every athlete would be recognizable in every country, the spots "reinforced the idea of an international campaign that everyone can enjoy."
However, it’s difficult to get hold of one Olympian, let alone the 13 featured in "Horses." This posed a problem for the director: "In sports commercials, the camera often feels quite static," Ledwidge said. "You’ll see a ball go out of a frame, and then you’ll cut to another frame as another person catches it. These are ways that directors shoot around the fact that these people weren’t in the same place at the same time. I wanted to make something that felt really loose, spontaneous, and as if everyone were really occupying this space at the same time."
To do this, explained Ledwidge, "we had doubles for everyone. And as loose as it seems, it was actually quite structured in terms of cutting in from a double, who was slightly out of focus, to the real person. Because I didn’t want to rely on cheating or any kind of post effects, I tried to make sure it was all there in the camera"—although there was some "trickery in the cutting room and just cutting around stuff."
Athletes often sustain injuries, but on set in the town of Zehara de los Atunes in Southern Spain, it was the director who was endangered. "I nearly got killed by the German discus thrower," Ledwidge remarked offhandedly. He had told the athlete to go through the motions of throwing the discus, but the man didn’t understand and sent his discus flying towards the crew. The offending object landed two feet from Ledwidge, knocking out two monitors and a video unit in the process. "The cameraman went absolutely ballistic. The poor guy [the discus thrower] got a little bit shy after that, and I think he feigned a back injury so he didn’t have to come out again!" Ledwidge laughed.
always on
Because time with the athletes was limited, Ledwidge kept the three cameras on, even when those cameras weren’t rolling for action, "just to get little moments—the laughs, the facial stuff." This helped maintain the spot’s informal atmosphere: "When you’ve got things like the girl somersaulting onto the horse, we wanted it to look very casual," he explained. "We tried not to treat it in a commercial sense of cutting to slow motion." The look matches the music. Instead of the epic chords that usually accompany footage of sports figures, Louis Prima’s upbeat and goofy "Chili Sauce" plays as the athletes romp around.
Because Ledwidge had managed to get most of the "Horses" in camera, post was minimal. Austen Humphries, producer at London post house The Mill, admitted, "When the boards originally came, there were a few shots that concerned us, because with women somersaulting onto horses, it could be quite post-heavy if they didn’t actually get it in camera." Luckily it wasn’t a problem, so, "we spent the majority of time in telecine, getting the grade right."
Only one shot required visual effects, Humphries said. That’s "when you look down onto the arena and you can see a lot of horses standing around. In post we put a couple of extra horses in—horses always look great. In the shot, each of the horses had a handler beside it," and those handlers had to be removed. But because it was a top shot and some of the handlers were hidden by shadows, Humphries and Flame artist/online editor Ben Turner spent some time searching for any hidden horse trainers.
If the athletes look like they’re having fun, Ledwidge enjoyed the shoot even more, despite his brush with death. "There are quite a few people who I really will be rooting for, having met them and seen how lovely they are," he concluded.
