http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OV4TjIYVyuY
Nike Turkey, W+K Amsterdam and director James Frost (Honey Badger) joined forces with a group of Turkish athletes to create and power some print art.
The film features football players Burak Yılmaz and Didier Drogba; runner Gamze Bulut; volleyball player Naz Aydemir; and basketball players Engin Atsür and Birsel Vardalı. In the film, everyday athletes move fast and hard alongside the professional athletes to power a ‘human printing press’. As the athletes increase their physical effort, it increases the speed of the printing press. Their collective and incremental effort creates beautifully designed prints that show movement in a whole new way.
Honey Badger director James Frost explains how the spot was created:
This was one of those rare projects where so much is happening at once. It’s not a ticking off of a shot list, but rather investing yourself along with the creatives to firstly conceive each element of the process, and then watch it come to life and work. It was hard work and there was not a lot of sleep for a period of time, but when it worked, it was an amazing experience watching these world-class athletes turn up and actually want to see how it worked and excited to be part of it.
It took about three weeks to create all the different devices. We shot the film in two very long days in a massive warehouse outside of Istanbul. The first step of the process was to devise a list of techniques, some of these were digital and some were more conventional printing techniques. Once we decided collectively which ones we felt would be the most effective, we started the process of pairing them to sports and exploring ways in which that sport or athlete could trigger something, or could actually create the image himself or herself. It got pretty complicated. So complicated in fact that a few weeks into the process I put the breaks on it all and realized we had to reverse engineer the process as the end product was a poster. Effectively, we had to look at each layer and how we would build a poster and then apply the sport. As much as the film was a really key component, the poster was the reason we were making the film so the poster had to be held above all else really in how we applied each technique. This of course affected the order in which the sports would be featured. There was a lot of organizing and moving around of things.
The first overall challenge, once we had finalized all the plans, was to actually build them from afar – the job was being shot in Turkey. The construction had to get underway about 2 weeks prior to us arriving. We found out pretty quickly that wood is not a material widely used in Turkey and everything that was being built was being built from steel and welded together. It was quite something. It gave very little room for error, and to change something was suddenly a huge ordeal. But the crew there did an incredible job of really taking these CAD drawings (Computer-aided design) and building them all.
The first thing we started with were the cyclists. The idea here is that these guys power the machine. It was a simple set up. We had six cyclists who were connected to a gear device that rotated the paper in a vertical position down the length of half a football field. In order for it to work, they had to work together as a team and that was part of the brief, athletes working together.
We then had a mini loop where as the paper went down the room a group of runners would run up on a ramp and cross a series of laser beams. As soon as the beams were broken it would trigger a series of compressed canons in the back to fire powdered ink at the paper as it was going past. That’s why some are more metallic than others as if the paper was not directly in front it got less of a blast. It just meant each poster truly was individual. This was the background layer.
Next we had the boxer. The set up was about him applying a secondary layer to the background. He punched a punching bag which was rigged with ink blotters on the back, so depending on where he hit, would dictate where the paper was blotted. The funny thing about this machine was, Eric Archer my production designer was so paranoid about him punching it off its frame he rigged a support beams to the actual walls of the warehouse. Sure enough, about 30 mins into shooting, the paper kept getting jammed and snarling the whole thing up. He had hit the bag with such force he still managed to bust it.
At this point the paper went through a device that dropped it down a shoot into a horizontal position on to a conveyer belt. Which I might add they built from scratch in Turkey. This then enters the only digital section of the whole process. I really wanted to capture an image that would be powerful and balance the poster from more abstract movement to a raw capture of movement. We set up a stroboscopic type scenario where the footballer would activate the flash sequence and then that image got processed in a computer into a two-tone image that then got printed onto the paper.
We then follow the conveyer down in-between a skate half pipe. This is where the skateboarder literally skated across the conveyer, which turned out to be not as simple as we thought. In fact, it was potentially dangerous as any differential in height could be a real problem, not to mention movement. When skating across the posters he had a sentence on the inside of the wheels that was dipped in UV ink prior to departing (you can see them at the top of the ramps, these white patches which were like large ink pads) and would only be visible on the poster in a black light environment. The sentence read “Move it”, in Turkish.
Then we moved on to NTC, which is Nike Training Class. Here we had the girls doing a routine called a “belly up”. The idea being when they drop to the floor one lands on a large stamping device, which is actually how it was designed and this presses a plate into the paper below and embosses the Nike swoosh on to the poster. As a little note the great thing about this project was the client were totally cool with us not overly branding the piece, so these little touches that gave it more or a personalized, limited edition feel and that was great.
Finally the conveyer took us to Basketball. Here it was as simple as turning the hoop into a giant letterpress that stamped the posters with “Just Do It”. I say simple, but the reality was they had to construct as massive spring mechanism that could hold the weight of the player and produce a smooth press action and deliver pressure at the same time. The thing looked like some kind of dinosaur Skelton, it was amazing. All made from steel of course.
James Frost has also directed amazing work for Radiohead, OK Go, Ford, IBM and Coldplay (he directed “Yellow).
Watch his reel here.
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