Wieden + Kennedy (W+K), Portland, Ore., got more than it bargained for when the agency worked with Anthony Mandler, a still photographer and music video director who has directed clips for Fergie, Beyonce, Snoop Dogg and The Killers, among other acts.
According to W+K art director Aaron Allen, the agency originally hired Mandler to simply shoot stills for a new “Beautiful Monster”-themed print campaign promoting the Team Elite II line of athletic shoes aimed at high school basketball players and featuring a specific shoe tailored for each player depending on the position they play. But when Mandler, who is repped by Les Enfants Terrible, Los Angeles, saw what the agency had in mind for the print, he couldn’t stop talking about how well it would translate to film.
“It was something that we had thought about,” according to Allen, who conceptualized the campaign with copywriter Ian Fairbrother. “But it wasn’t anything we had pitched to Nike.” Pumped up by Mandler’s enthusiasm about the enormous potential this concept had to truly come alive on film, the creatives ultimately did pitch and sell Nike on the idea of adding a spot to the mix, resulting in the creation of the gorgeously artful :30 “Beautiful Monster.”
Shot on 16mm film, the black-and-white spot features an original track composed by Mojo and opens on a single player walking toward the camera dribbling a ball. As the spot unfolds, players emerge from behind him, making jump shots and dribbling from side to side. It is almost as though we are seeing the players through a kaleidoscope. At the end of the spot, they come together to form one mass in motion.
“The overall idea of the campaign is that you become the beautiful monster–the monster being a metaphor for the team,” Allen said.
The team portrayed in “Beautiful Monster” is made up of local Portland players Arsenio Wagner, Lamar Porter, Tyler West Jr., Jerram Harte, Chris Botz, Justin Minton and Devin Boss. The athletes range from high school kids to college players who looked young enough to still be in high school. “The coolest part [of this project] was to see these kids from Portland end up looking like stars in the final product,” Fairbrother enthused. “We loved giving them the tape at the end. They really loved it.”
Dual purpose This was a low-budget project, so Mandler was required to shoot both the print and TV portions of the campaign on a basketball court at a Portland high school in just one day. The players were dressed in white uniforms and performed in a dark cube of sorts–a black curtain was draped around three sides of a cube-shaped area in the center of the court, and a black rubber mat covered the floor.
Explaining the decision to go with a black and white color scheme, Allen said, “I think we just loved the starkness and the grittiness of it. A lot of stuff we’ve seen in this [athletic shoe advertising] world lately is really shiny and glossy and slick, and we made a conscious effort to go opposite of that.”
The choice also helped to give the sense that these players were amateurs–not professional athletes, Allen noted.
Given that the kids did not have experience in front of a camera, a basketball tech was brought in to work with them. “He was off camera having them do moves, having them mimic him,” Fairbrother said, noting, “These kids were already really experienced basketball players, but he got them into the mindset and got their bodies moving how they move on the court.”
Mandler had a good grasp on what would and wouldn’t work, Allen said, and shot a number of moves so that there would be plenty of options in post. While the concept was there, no one knew exactly what the final spot would look like during production.
Jeff Selis “The spot came alive in editorial,” Allen shared, citing the skill of the spot’s editor Jeff Selis, who works out of Room in Venice, Calif. Mandler, who has hired Selis to edit music videos, recommended the editor to the agency. Allen and Fairbrother admitted that if it wasn’t for Mandler’s recommendation, they likely would have just hired someone they had an established working relationship with. But working with Selis turned out to be a refreshing change of pace. “[Jeff] hasn’t done a lot of commercial work, and that actually worked in our favor because he came at the spot with a music video style–more storytelling than like a commercial,” Allen said.
“He had a great eye for design,” Fairbrother added. “The first cut we saw just blew us away even though it was very rough.”
Selis had license to be creative in cutting “Beautiful Monster” in part because he wasn’t constrained by the need to get heavy-handed with product shots. “[Nike] definitely likes us to get their product out there, but in this campaign we all agreed ahead of time that we would do that through the Internet, the interactive [Nike.com/nikebasketball/usa/],” Allen said. “We all agreed that the TV should be kept pretty clean, and pure brand for this product.”
