With Y2K anxieties mounting to a fever pitch as the year comes to a close, Nike’s "Morning After" rolls a score of Y2K catastrophe scenarios into one ball while smartly extending Nike’s "Just Do It" spot franchise. To be fair, the jury on the Y2K spot genre will remain out until the last second ticks away on December 31. But it’s going to be tough to top the spot: an audacious, ambitious and droll piece via Wieden & Kennedy, Portland, Ore., and directed by Spike Jonze of bicoastal/international Satellite.
As the spot’s title indicates, "Morning After" shows the aftermath of the millennium celebration. The spot begins with the sound of an alarm clock that segues into a burlesque rendition of "Auld Lang Syne," which provides the soundtrack for the rest of the :60. The spot’s protagonist—let’s call him John Doe—wakes to the sound of the clock and, after reaching for aspirin, makes his way through the leftovers of a New Year’s Eve celebration. The first inkling that all is not well in this Y2K world comes when Doe, now outside and dressed in his running gear, is stretching against a wall in preparation for his morning run. As he’s stretching, a tank rolls by on the street behind him, though Doe remains ostensibly oblivious to the heavy artillery.
Beginning his jaunt, Doe runs past a convenience store where the lights and sprinkler system are malfunctioning. Next he passes an ATM that is spewing cash and attracting a horde of frenzied bystanders who descend on the machine with all the fury of newly announced lottery winners. From there, the spot documents the complete pandemonium that’s breaking out along Doe’s path. He runs through a traffic jam, a looting scene complete with riot police assailing pedestrians, and multiple explosions. Doe remains nonchalant through it all. He pauses to catch his breath as a swarm of helicopters descends on the city burning behind him.
He gets back on track, though, and glances only briefly at a missle wildly rocketing through the sky above him. In a street setting—complete with an escaped giraffe—Doe approaches another runner who is going in the opposite direction. "Morning," says Doe to his fellow runner, who replies, "How ya doin’?" Both runners maintain indifference to the raging chaos; they pass each other and keep on going. Their dedication to sport provides the transition to the "Just Do It" tag, which appears at the bottom of the screen as "Auld Lang Syne" comes to a close.
When creative director/art director Hal Curtis and creative director/copywriter Chuck McBride initially conceived "Morning After," they outlined a series of vignettes that showed the world as it went awry just after the New Year’s Eve countdown. Those vignettes were to be followed by a short epilogue of the runner on his morning course. "The runner was the payoff, as opposed to the story," recalled Curtis. (After working on "Morning After," McBride left W&K to become executive creative director at TBWA/Chiat/ Day, San Francisco).
But when McBride and Curtis presented the spot to Jonze, the director suggested that the spot revolve around the runner. Vincent Landay, Jonze’s producer at Satellite, said that Jonze made that suggestion based on his instincts. "Spike’s really good at the strength of the character and [the strength of] the story," said Landay, who also was a producer on Jonze’s Being John Malkovich. "So rather than have the runner just be a button, Spike suggested, ‘Let’s see him from the beginning and stay with him the whole time.’"
McBride and Curtis went for that idea and eventually convinced Nike, which was already sold on the original concept, to go with the new story. After seeing some of the other Y2K spots depicting what happened as the clock struck midnight, Curtis and McBride agreed that showing the morning after was a fresher take. After settling with that concept revision, McBride and Curtis incorporated elements from their original vignettes into the runner’s journey.
"Morning After" was a complex affair that was lensed on the streets of downtown Los Angeles over a three-day period. Assisting the crew on the shoot was the National Guard—who brought the tank used in the spot—and hundreds of extras who played the crazed bystanders looting the stores and generally freaking out. Landay said the production team was so consumed with getting everything accomplished that no one was thinking about just how ambitious the spot was. "It was [like] doing some of the biggest scenes from Independence Day in a three-day shoot—and a short prep period at that," he observed.
In contrast to the outlandish events of Independence Day, "Morning After" deals with some very real fears about Y2K catastrophe and evokes a Fahrenheit 451-style government run amok. But the spot never becomes ominous. "The spot plays off the extreme fears that people have, but a lot of the humor of Spike’s style is to portray things as realistically as possible, even when he’s making fun of them," Landay said.
Curtis observed that part of the spot’s humor came from the "Auld Lang Syne" soundtrack. That became evident when the agency experimented with a few different soundtrack variations. Without music, the spot was "a little too real in the middle of it," when the runner goes past the looting and riot police. "Everybody was happy with the final choice of music because it told you that [the spot] wasn’t to be taken seriously, that we were having fun," said Curtis.
Landay said the central character’s performance was another key to the spot’s humor. The actor who plays the runner is Tony Maxwell, a moonlighting thespian who by day is the music video sales representative at bicoastal/international Propaganda Films. Landay described Maxwell as his and Jonze’s "go-to guy," because Maxwell always came through for them in a bind. Maxwell had previously starred in Jonze’s "Da Funk" video for Daft Punk—he was the man with the dog-head—and also choreographed a dance bit for Being John Malkovich. Jonze and Landay knew that Maxwell would fit the bill for the spot: "We had cast hundreds and hundreds of people as extras but couldn’t find somebody that fit everything we were looking for, in terms of conveying who this guy was without [the use of] dialogue," said Landay.
The spot was a reunion of sorts for the players who also worked on Jonze’s Being John Malkovich. In addition to Landay, Lance Acord, the spot’s DP, was cinematographer on the feature. Other collaborators on both projects included Gray Matter, Venice, Calif., which did visual effects, and sound designer Ren Klyce of Mit Out Sound, Sausalito, Calif. Landay said that working with these creative collaborators made the process more efficient. "[Spike and I] can speak in shorthand with these people," reflected Landay. "That is so important, especially when you’re talking about aesthetics."
Gray Matter primarily worked effects into a few scenes. Where the helicopters are descending on the city, the company created CG helicopters and substituted a plate of San Francisco for what was actually Los Angeles. The company created the missile and its smoke trail as it swirls through the sky. Where the giraffe lingers as the two runners pass each other, Gray Matter color-corrected and then rotoscoped the animal so it would be more prominent in the scene’s composition (the giraffe was real). Gray Marshall, Gray Matter’s visual effects supervisor, said that Jonze’s mantra on the spot was to incorporate absolutely seamless effects.
"Spike is very particular about his effects work, in that he doesn’t want it to be anything ‘special,’" explained Marshall. "He wants it to be an integrated part of his overall scheme of things. … Frankly, it’s harder to achieve that level of simplicity than to blow up the world with an earth-shattering kaboom. When it’s simple and clean, there’s less to hide behind."
Landay was pleased and almost surprised that "Morning After" is airing on television. "I’m just amazed that the networks were willing to air it, [and] that Nike was willing to make it," said Landay. "We kept waiting for the other shoe to drop, so to speak. … [The networks] don’t let spots air if somebody doesn’t have their seat belt on. So the fact that we could do something this fun and this outlandish is great. It’s a good sign, and I hope it continues."
"At the end of the day, the spot is about priorities," said Curtis. "Even though the world is coming to an end around you, you still have to do what you have to do."
