Top Spot Credits
CLIENT
Nike.
PRODUCTION CO.
Propaganda Films, bicoastal/international. Lloyd Stein, director; Jeff Cutter, DP; Paul Ure, line producer; Andy Traines, executive producer. Shot on location.
AGENCY
Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, San Francisco. Rich Silverstein, creative director; Paul Hirsch, art director; Josh Denberg, copywriter; Matthew Winks, producer.
EDITORIAL
Bob ‘n Sheila’s Edit World, San Francisco. Bob Spector, offline editor.
POST
Rushes, Los Angeles. Chris Lyons, colorist. Realtime Video, San Francisco. Sean McLean, Henry artist.
AUDIO POST
Crescendo! Studios, San Francisco. Jay Shilliday, audio mixer.
Having been assigned Nike’s first mountain biking ads, San Francisco shop Goodby, Silverstein & Partners makes continuing the Swoosher’s tradition of breakout creative look easy. The six-spot package, directed by Lloyd Stein of bicoastal Propaganda Films, broke June 21 during the X Games (covered by ABC, ESPN and ESPN2), and is set to run through September.
Of the six kitschy, copy-driven spots, “Shrubbery” just may be the funniest. Like the others, it parodies the jumpy, anemic-colored public safety films of the ’50s and ’60s, utilizing such stylistic devices as yellowed and scratched film, missing frames and out-of-sync dialogue.
The :30 opens with a title announcing: “Mountain Safety, Part 9, `Shrubbery.’ ” Snatches of stock music from an actual ’60s educational film–a mountaineering-type song, complete with yippie-yi-ays–begin and end the piece.
The scene is a nature trail, where an earnest, monotonal park ranger kneels on the ground and says, “When riding in the mountains, it’s nice to know your surroundings.”
Over the next shot–a group of bikers heading down a hilly path–the ranger says, “Greg is about to wipe out. What should he try to hit?” The scene then freezes–with Greg heading over the handlebars–and arrows pop up to point out Greg’s choices. A circle appears in the lower left corner of the screen with the ranger, who explains that “shrubs and bushes are covered in painful burrs, while rocks can cause massive contusions.”
The POV then cuts back to a full shot of the ranger, again kneeling on the ground. “So choose wisely,” he says. “And remember–open wounds and blood attract flies. So always clean up after you regain consciousness.” The spot concludes with a shot of the bikers riding back up the trail, overlaid with graphics of the Nike swoosh symbol and the title “Mountain Biking.”
Agency creative director Rich Silverstein explained that the campaign reflects the client’s marketing savvy. “As only Nike knows how, [they demonstrate that they] really understand the sport that they’re marketing,” he said, explaining that they were trying to capture “a certain spirit [of] mountain biking.”
Goodby copywriter Josh Denberg, who teamed with partner/art director Paul Hirsch and producer Matthew Winks on the job, said the concept originated from a discussion during which they “talked about the various things you might encounter on a mountain, like mosquitos, poison oak, falling and ripping your leg open, being mauled by mountain lions … ”
From there, the team decided to spoof governmental safety films. “It was pretty much all we remembered from elementary school,” related Denberg.
Stein, selected according to Denberg for his “bent” sensibilities, proved a key collaborator. “You can see that it’s shot very simply,” the director said, adding that he drew inspiration from a movie he saw in eighth grade home-ec. class on kitchen safety that left an “indelible” mark.
Stein noted that the team did a lot of testing to perfect the spot’s distinctive amateurish, “shitty” look, which was achieved with a combination of different film exposures, filters, lenses, film-to-tape tweaking and jump-cut edits supplied by Bob Spector of Bob ‘n Sheila’s Edit World in San Francisco. “It was a lot of fun for [Spector] because we didn’t have to worry about all the things we drive ourselves crazy over, like sync,” said Stein.
Stein and DP Jeff Cutter shot the spots in two days in late May on location at Angeles National Forest, just outside Los Angeles. The five bikers were all pro or semipro bikers, while the actor cast as the ranger came very close to Stein’s initial idea for a Dudley Do-Right character. “He had a head like a cinder block and had a lisp, which added to the character by making him that much more real,” said Stein.
To procure the obvious acting and clumsy line delivery desired, Stein didn’t give the actor the script until close to shooting time. “Obviously the spots are a joke, because of what he’s saying,” Stein added, “but I think if he’d been written a little more seriously, it would look like a real training film from 1962.’
