All the great ones have it: Pelé had it. Nadia Comaneci had it. Michael Jordan still has it. And as the top-scoring player in soccer history—male or female—Mia Hamm certainly has it. To paraphrase late 1980s grunge-band forerunner Faith No More: What is it? Could it be a multi-million-dollar endorsement contract with a sports beverage company? No.
It is simply "ice in the veins"—that time-honored cliché bestowed on only the coolest of athletic cucumbers.
Gatorade Ice’s new :30, "Defining Mia," explores the ice water in Hamm’s veins, and in doing so, offers up some striking detail, both athletic and anatomic. Created by Element 79 Partners, Chicago, the spot was directed by Phil Joanou of bicoastal Villains. It combines live-action soccer footage filmed by DP Jeff Cronenweth, and CGI renderings by A52, Los Angeles, of what we might imagine to be Mia Hamm’s ice-cold endoskeleton during a crucial moment on the pitch.
The spot opens on a soccer ball suspended in the air above a stadium lit for a night game. Suddenly the action erupts. We follow the ball back down toward the field, where a determined-looking Hamm is racing towards it for a header—which she executes with a slow-motion leap between two opposing players. The next shot is a CGI rendering of an X-ray of Hamm’s skeleton, appearing as a muted blue-and-white frame, coursing with the super-chilled essence of life. We then speed up again as Hamm jogs down the field, coolly scanning the opposition and planning her attack.
"It happens in the blink of an eye," says Hamm, "that defining moment in every game."
Now, in slow motion again, Hamm begins to set up for the crucial shot on goal: a stupefying bicycle kick, which sends the ball past several defenders and the diving goalkeeper’s outstretched hands. "When that moment comes, will you have ice in your veins?" asks Hamm, who has now turned towards us—confident that the shot has reached its mark.
Ice water streams down her face with a crackling noise, indicating it’s about to freeze. Then we cut to a product shot of Hamm quaffing a Gatorade Ice. "It’s here. It’s clear. New Gatorade Ice," a male voiceover intones, as the Gatorade logo appears on the screen, only to be smashed into a thousand pieces by an ice chard.
Element 79’s Doug Behm, the spot’s senior art director, revealed that he’d "been thinking about the ‘ice in the veins’ concept for a long time before the spot was created." In November 2001, with new Gatorade Ice slated to hit the shelves in March ’02, Behm realized he had a perfect opportunity to film the ice/vessel concept in action. Enter Joanou, who hadn’t worked with any of the Element 79 team before, but had made an impression on them through the spots on his reel—particularly Nike’s "Horror," through Wieden+Kennedy, Portland, Ore.
"The energy and ideas Phil brought to the project were hard to resist," remembered Behm, "He got what we were doing right away. In fact, he had so many ideas that it was almost exhausting to listen to him when we were talking about the spot over the phone."
The actual shoot took place in the Los Angeles Coliseum over the course of three nights in February. Each of the nights was drizzly and cold: "Ice in the veins was becoming a reality for everyone who had to stand out in the cold," joked Behm.
And how did Hamm handle the chilly conditions? "My guess would be that when Mia was young and starting out, doing a shoot late into the night, in a freezing cold stadium, for a commercial project wasn’t what she had in mind," ventured Joanou. "Still, she was terrific to work with, and so were the other players we brought in for the shoot. There was a lot of commitment and dedication from Mia and the players. They were more concerned with getting the job done right than with knowing what time we were going to wrap—much different than whiny actors."
When asked if there was a point in the shoot when the players were allowed to play without direction, Joanou indicated that every shot was tightly choreographed. "I storyboarded and shot-listed the piece very specifically," stated Joanou, "We had five cameras rolling on every shot … It was done much like a dance number of a fight sequence—everything was staged—piece by piece by piece."
Joanou said he modeled the spot after a slow-motion shootout in his ’90 feature State of Grace. He called "Defining Mia" a more complex shoot than that 10-minute shootout scene. "For [the ad] we used everything from 24 frames to 360 frames per second, including 90-degree shutter and 45-degree shutter. We also used some blue-screen footage for compositing."
The State of Grace shootout, Joanou remarked, was itself modeled on director Sam Peckinpah’s famous shootout scene in his ’69 feature The Wild Bunch. "That scene was a series of repeated actions shot at different frame rates and edited so that the cuts back-track on top of the action … So, really, the ‘Defining Mia’ sequence is the grandchild of The Wild Bunch," offered Joanou, laughing.
Another interesting aspect of the filming was its lighting. Joanou decided to top-light the stadium, à la the boxing ring at the beginning of Raging Bull. This involved a massive lighting apparatus covering an area of 30 square yards.
"All in all this is a pretty jam-packed little :30," continued Joanou, "A52 worked extremely hard, especially on the crowd compositing: They turned 250 extras into a mass of 40,000."
A52 also created a fully articulated skeleton, based on Hamm’s measurements. Then the company designed particle animation to run through the network of CGI veins within the skeleton. And, of course, no recent Gatorade spot would be complete without stylized sweat designed by A52 visual effects artist/Inferno artist Simon Brewster. That took the form of the icy drips appearing on Hamm’s face toward the end of the spot.
And what of the dramatic shattering of Gatorade’s logo at spot’s end? Behm said he was surprised when Gatorade OK’d the concept. "Most clients don’t usually like that sort of thing, concluded Behm, "but Gatorade told us, ‘The more you can smash it up, the better!.’ "
