A global :60 spot for Nike created by Wieden+Kennedy (W+K), Shanghai, and titled “Breath” finds a bevy of world-class athletes–including basketball great Kobe Bryant, tennis ace Roger Federer and soccer star Ronaldinho–all training on the same indoor athletic field. It is quite a sight to see, but it didn’t happen for real–getting even two of these superstar athletes together would have been a miracle of scheduling. Ultimately, they wound up rubbing shoulders through the magic of visual effects.
The spot’s director, Paul Hunter of bicoastal/international HSI Productions, worked closely with Moneyshots Post, Santa Monica, to create a remarkably convincing illusion. Asked to outline the challenges presented by the project, Moneyshots Post Creative Director/Lead VFX supervisor Elad Offer said with a laugh, “Pretty much everything.”
He was only half joking. “The biggest challenge with these kinds of jobs is balancing the pressures of production with what we need to do on set. We have to think things through,” Offer said, “or it won’t come together in the end.” Thankfully Offer and the Moneyshots artisans had a true partner in Hunter. “We work a lot with Paul,” Offer said, “so there was a level of comfort there for me to put my two cents in creatively.”
The process started with the creation of a pre-visualization that started with stand-ins representing each of the athletes being positioned on a full-floor set-up of the athletic field, which was later created in CG using Maya. DP Matthew Libatique shot digital stills of the stand-ins to get a sense of what compositions would make the most sense. Measurements were also taken to map out where the camera needed to be for the subsequent shoots that would be done with the real athletes.
“It was priceless,” Hunter said of the resulting pre-vis. “We couldn’t have done this without it.”
Of course, there were some bumps in the road. “During the process of the shoot, some athletes dropped out, and some others came in,” Offer related, “and height makes a difference. If you had composed a shot for somebody who is six-foot-six, and you now have to work with somebody who is six-foot, the composition is different. So there was a lot of that to deal with, but we figured it out as we went along.”
It was a long journey. For nearly two months, Hunter and his crew traveled around the world, from Los Angeles to London, shooting the athletes greenscreen as they worked out. At one point, due to a scheduling conflict, Hunter actually found himself directing Federer, who was in Barcelona, via satellite from New York.
Playbook
Was it hard for the athletes to understand their roles in “Breath” given that they weren’t working with their co-stars in person? “What helped the athletes was the pre-vis,” Hunter said. “Because we had the pre-vis, I was able to walk them over to the monitor [at each shoot] and show them some of the pre-vis stuff, show them the part that they were playing.”
The most complicated part of the shoot, according to Hunter, was working with Bryant and fellow basketball superstar LeBron James to make it look like they were interacting in the same space and guarding each other when they were in fact never in the same room together for the commercial.
Compositing challenge
Once Hunter finished his ambitious worldwide sprint to capture all of the athletes on film, the Moneyshots crew set about compositing them (using the Inferno and Shake) onto the CG athletic field. “This was definitely a big challenge [in terms of compositing] because of the sheer amount of layers,” Offer acknowledged. “Every athlete is his own layer, so getting them to the point that they actually felt like they were in the same space was something that was very important in the compositing process.”
The compositing was completed in a three-week timeframe, with artisans working multiple shifts on three Infernos and a pair of Shake stations.
Editors Angus Wall and Brad Waskewich of Los Angeles-based Rock Paper Scissors cut the spot, which features a soundtrack of breath sounds that capture the intensity of professional athletes training.
The process of creating the soundtrack was complex. Timbaland laid down a track, and in the end, portions of that track were incorporated into the final track composed by Kenny Segal and Nate Morgan of Elias Arts, Los Angeles. Dean Hovey of Elias Arts did the sound design.
The track includes breath sounds of the actual athletes, recorded by Hunter during the shoots. “One thing that attracted me [to this commercial] on the creative end,” Hunter pointed out, “was the idea of the athletes breathing in their preparation and making that synch up and become one kind of energy.”
