Never mind the box, agency 180/TBWA, San Francisco, has done some commendable "out of the body" thinking for its first collaboration with shoemaker adidas. Promoting adidas’ a3 line of cushioned sneakers, the :30 "Slugs" features a pair of a3s that jog around a city all by themselves—seemingly without the aid of a human body to "fill the shoes."
Directed and DP’d by Frank Budgen—who is handled in Europe by London-based Gorgeous Enterprises, and stateside by bicoastal Anonymous Content—"Slugs" opens on a busy city intersection. We hear a traffic cop’s whistle, as the camera cuts to a pair of a3 running shoes at the base of the sidewalk. As the crowd begins to move, so too do the shoes—of their own accord. Could it be the invisible man has decided to jog himself into shape?
Next we cut to reaction shots of several different men and women on the street; all of them are universally befuddled at the specter of self-propelled footwear. The people are not overtly astonished, however. Instead they wear a variety of the "only in New York" expression, exuding a world-weary urbanity that surely has seen things more strange and horrible than a pair of trainers jogging themselves.
The shoes approach another crosswalk, this one less crowded than the last. A backpack-toting young man glances down at the wonder of disembodied bipedalism lingering before his feet. The shoes jog in place, as they wait for the sign to change from don’t walk to walk.
With the walk sign appearing, the sneakers again take off. Now we see a pair of briefcase-toting businessmen pause from their surely important conversations to gaze at the weirdness. All the while, the action is being moved along by Alex Gimeno’s catchy Latin horn track "Mambo 1000."
Pounding the sidewalk again, the shoes make a turn past a barking dog. They proceed to run under a truck—the first bit of evidence to pierce the previously unassailable invisible man theory. Soon after, one of the shoes hops through a stray life preserver lying on the sidewalk, and the invisible man hypotheses takes another hit.
Crossing another intersection now, the shoes swerve out at least ten feet from one another in order to avoid a passing pedestrian; the invisible man premise lies in shambles. How then, are we to explain the miraculous moving footwear?
After the shoes cross the street, they pass a newsstand, perplexing the proprietor, as they turn around in tandem to run backwards for a moment. Rounding the corner of the newsstand, the two shoes approach a man with a broom—tidying up his part of the sidewalk. One of the shoes ends up in the broom’s path and is swept off into a gutter. At this point the life seems to go out of the swept up shoe.
The other shoe doubles back to check on its fallen mate. It pauses, and out pops the culprit: the cutest little green slug you ever did see! He pokes his two eyes and his antennae up out of the shoe, and the camera zooms out to reveal two of these loveable mollusks—one per shoe. The slug who encountered the broom is lying half out of his shoe, and both critters are panting from their jog.
The invisible man is nothing more than your ordinary Hollywood ectoplasm.
The lime green slimesters exchange glances, as if to say "We sure are crazy for being out in this heat, but we’re going to finish our jog by Jove!" Then, they disappear back into the sneakers and off they go—plodding down another city sidewalk, keeping it real for all the laggards, sedentary males, and heart attack risks that ought really to consider purchasing a new pair of sneakers. Chalk one up for the invertebrate kingdom.
Appropriately enough, the 180/TBWA team hatched the "Slugs" concept during a sojourn in Amsterdam. Co-executive creative director/creative director Chuck McBride recalled that he, creative director/art director Todd Grant and co-executive creative director Peter McHugh were working on a different project in the Dutch metropolis when it first became apparent how they would like to kick off 180/ TBWA’s first campaign for adidas. "Todd and I had the idea for some shoes running through city streets [without an attached body]," remembered McBride, "and then we talked to Peter, and he identified a few ways to make the spot more global—chiefly by having a pair of slugs crawl out of the shoes."
When asked if the invisible man misdirection was an intentional aspect of the spot, McBride revealed that this misdirection was the handiwork work of helmer Budgen. "His take was that we should slowly reveal that an invisible man is impossible, because of the things the shoes are doing," remarked McBride, who indicated Budgen had been the agency’s first choice on its list of possible directors for the job.
Because Budgen was not available for comment as of press time, SHOOT spoke instead with Gorgeous executive producer Paul Rothwell, who noted that though Budgen can be a master of realism, "much of his work lately has portrayed ridiculously unreal situations. For instance: Nike’s ‘Tag,’ Reebok’s ‘Sofa,’ and now adidas ‘Slugs.’
"He’s also run the gamut of shoe companies now," Rothwell continued, laughing.
Rothwell also shed light on another mystery of the spot: What were all those lime green Volkswagen Beetles doing on the city streets? "Well, we shot all this in Mexico City," offered Rothwell, "and all the cabs there are lime green VW Beetles."
"The only thing I told Frank before he flew to the location was that if he wanted to avoid the taxis showing up in the shots, he was going to have a hard time," related Rothwell. "But Frank likes to use every aspect of a location … so the taxis were never a problem."
Budgen’s live action footage was, of course, heavily supplemented by the visual effects work of A52, Los Angeles. Rothwell indicated that while Gorgeous had worked with "Slugs" editor Angus Wall of Rock Paper Scissors, Los Angeles, before, Gorgeous had never collaborated with A52: "We have nothing but praise for them," Rothwell revealed.
A52’s Simon Brewster, who served as creative director/visual effects supervisor/inferno artist on "Slugs," remarked that there were "two parts to this job: the live action shoes and the CG slugs."
Brewster said that in addition to removing the actor who was filmed running through the city, A52 also had to replace the bits of the shoes that were obscured by the actor’s motion. "We had a shoe scanned and built a 3D shoe that was actually colored and lit on the Inferno, as opposed to CG," said Brewster, Then we basically tracked it in—usually by hand—to match the live action footage. Then we blended the two bits together. … It made your wrists hurt after doing a couple of those shots."
As far as creating the slugs, A52 executive producer/on-set visual effects advisor Darcy Leslie Parsons revealed that the CG work was done using Side Effects’ Houdini software, which, according to Parsons, "takes longer to set up than Lightwave or Maya," but allows for more animating flexibility once the CG environment is up and running."
This flexibility proved useful when the A52 team realized that perhaps the slugs’ jogging-induced heavy breathing was too exaggerated. Houdini allowed them to easily slow the slugs’ chest movements down to a more low-key level of huffing and puffing.
Unfortunately, Houdini is unable to offer a similar software solution for out of shape human joggers.
