Throughout Michael Jordan’s career people have been asking themselves, "Is there anything this guy can’t do?" And just when we thought we’d seen it all, we might find ourselves doing a triple-take at a recent Gatorade ad—directed by Joe Pytka of Venice, Calif.-based PYTKA, out of Element 79 Partners, Chicago—that stars Jordan, Jordan and, well, Jordan.
The spot, "23 vs. 39," pits the present-day, 39-year-old Jordan, who now plays for the Washington Wizards, against his former Chicago Bulls self, circa 1987. The commercial opens on the older Jordan dribbling around an empty basketball arena. A 23-year-old Jordan walks onto the court, wearing the iconic number 23 red Bulls jersey, and the two face off in an intense battle of will. As they play, the present day Jordan taunts the younger with his wisdom, while the 23-year-old schools the older Jordan with classic Jordanian dunks. There are no winners here, just raw competition that poses one of the great sports hypotheses of modern times: could the younger Jordan beat the older Jordan? At the spot’s conclusion, the two men are sitting on the sidelines, drinking Gatorade. Suddenly, a North Carolina Tar Heels-era Jordan enters the picture, looking for a challenge. The 39-year-old Jordan playfully tells his 23-year-old self, "Get your young butt out there."
The concept behind "23 vs. 39" is larger than Jordan himself. "It was the age-old question of comparing eras, like, ‘Could Muhammad Ali have beaten Mike Tyson?’ " says Geoff Edwards, creative director/art director at Element 79, who, along with creative director/copywriter Jon Flannery, came up with the idea about a year ago.
"We were working on another job for Gatorade," recalls Flannery, "and we were talking casually about Michael Jordan, and it was just one of those ‘what ifs?’"
The idea sat for a while, but then two things happened to make exploring it possible: Jordan came out of retirement to play for the Washington Wizards, and he signed a new five-year contract with Gatorade in March ’02. "At that point, the stars were all aligned, and Jon and I were asked to work on an assignment under the guise of, ‘If you could do Michael Jordan’s last spot for Gatorade, what would it be?’ So we started to look at how we were going to take on this challenge," relates Edwards.
At that time, Element 79 Partners had been open less than a year. (The ad shop was launched in the fall of ’01 by the New York-headquartered Omnicom Group to handle several brands in the PepsiCo portfolio of products.) Edwards and Flannery had each worked on Gatorade at FCB Chicago before coming over to Element 79, but they were new to working with each other. Now, they were looking at creating a spot that had to appeal to Jordan, contain the visual effects necessary to pull off the concept, yet still be tasteful enough to protect the Jordan legacy. No small feat.
The two researched several directors and decided on Pytka, who already had an existing relationship with Jordan. Pytka and Jordan had collaborated on the feature Space Jam, as well as on several commercials. "We wanted something very classic, but we also wanted somebody who understood not just basketball, but Michael Jordan as a human being," notes Flannery. "That was very important to the spot."
Indeed, the commercial is about Jordan’s competitive nature with himself and documenting that kind of personal intensity in an organic way. Keeping the visual effects transparent was a true challenge. The director brought to the agency’s attention some proprietary technology that effects studio Digital Domain, Venice, Calif., had used to do a digital head replacement in the ’02 feature XXX. Edwards recounts that one day, Pytka and the creative team from Element 79 were sitting in the offices of Digital Domain after viewing some clips demonstrating its new technology, and "Joe said to Digital Domain, ‘You see your technology? You guys are here’—and he put his hand at one level. Then he raised it about two feet higher and said, ‘This is where we want to be for this spot.’ "
Heading up the Digital Domain team was senior visual effects supervisor Fred Raimondi. Jordan’s head was created by using Digital Domain’s proprietary "intelligent skin" technology, which was initially developed for XXX. The software essentially emulates human skin in its texture, movement and the way it stretches based on the bone structure underneath.
Raimondi and his team fashioned a likeness of the ’87 college-era Jordan by doing a cyber scan of Jordan’s head, which was then re-sculpted by Melanie Okamura, a digital sculptor, to make him look younger. What Raimondi calls an "unrelaxed head"—meaning expressionless—was then handed over to a team of animators headed up by CG supervisor Brad Parker to give the face movement based on what was happening in each shot. The team referenced archival footage of Jordan’s facial expressions as he performed his classic moves to make sure his digital likeness remained true.
Jordan’s head was then composited onto the body of 25-year-old Kevin Daley, the young man who plays opposite Jordan in the commercial. "We shot the spot for three days at the end of August," relates Jeff Felter, executive producer at Element 79, "and it took four-and-a-half months worth of compositing and layering to get [the effects] to where they needed to be."
Virtual Double
The agency looked at more than 200 athletes before finding Daley, who plays for a semi-pro team in Phoenix. According to Edwards, Daley could approximate Jordan’s moves as if he’d been studying the basketball great his entire life. At one point during the shoot, the agency wanted to capture some of Jordan’s Bulls-era dunks, so Pytka did a sequence of takes where Daley dunks over Jordan again and again. At first Jordan was okay with it, but he soon became uncomfortable with the role of standing on the sidelines, and joked with the agency guys about feeling like an extra.
The spot, which began airing on New Years Day during the college football bowl games, is now slated to run during the ’03 telecast of the Super Bowl, marking Gatorade’s first foray into Super Sunday advertising. This, admittedly, is Edwards’ childhood dream. "It’s the reason I got into the business," says Edwards. "I have always admired the spots [during the Super Bowl] and to be on the stage with the greatest athlete of all time is a thrill."
