Notes from Psyop on Nike Elite Football Series.

We were approached by Nike to take their existing campaign of prominent football players cast in stone and focus on four boots, all featuring new technology never before seen, and to create a spot that is being shown in-store during the world cup.

Models of the football players were provided to us by the client, used by Nike in their print campaign. Some of these models had beautiful detail that we were able to take advantage of visually and specially our CG team did an really nice work on the textures and lighting.

Nike sent us the four pairs of shoes, soon to be released worldwide, we had to 3D scan them to make sure we were not loosing any details of their new technology. Each shoe has a different specific material that we wanted to visually outline. However, we did find that the level of detail that we needed for some of the macro shots did not hold up in the scans, so we set up a live action shoot here in our studio shooting with a 5D and taping the shoes to metal dowels being supported on top of bench horses to stabilize the motion.

Maya was used for all animation and lighting, including some additional modeling. Zbrush was also utilized for the modeling portion to clean up any files that needed to be dealt with. Compositing was a mix of Nuke, After Effects and Flame for overall look and colors.

For the spot we really wanted to focus on the shoes and the expression of the players’ faces, spending time on their actions and reactions - like frozen moments of glory before or after scoring a goal or when players interact with the crowd. For the exploding particles we wanted to keep it organic but very graphic at the same time so we used the bright orange color palette of the shoes.

The sound design was very challenging, as this spot is featured in store, we wanted to keep it very organic, made out of crowd, soccer stadium sounds but also using computer sound design to enhance the technology, without it being a soundtrack. We liked to create a build up, until a momentum, the final reveal of the four shoes.

Having our team come together doing something they love is a major reason why we were able to pull this off on such a ridiculously short time frame. We were allotted 2.5 weeks of production to create a 90 second full CG spot with original music. Amazing.

When it comes to the World Cup, it's always amazing to see everybody cheering for their country, soccer is just an excuse if I can say ... so yes we can say we are all fans.



Credits:
Please note: The spot came to Psyop direct from client. No agency involved.

Client: Nike Football Brand Design
Creative Director: Andy Walker
Senior Designer: Gary Horton
Producers: Penny Pijnenburg, Els Tau

Director: Psyop
Production Company: Psyop, Los Angeles
Psyop Creative Directors: Thibault Debaveye, Alex Hanson
Executive Producer: Neysa Horsburgh
Producer: Alyssa Evans
Associate Producer: Amanda Miller
Editor: Mike Hackett, Carsten Becker
Storyboard Artist: Wayne Coe, Josh Wiesenfeld
Designer: Jake Sargeant
VFX Supervisor/TD/Look Dev: Chris Eckardt
Modeler: Mike Riendeau
Pre-Visualization: Yvain Gnabro, Sammy Wong
3D Animators: Yvain Gnabro, Ari Teger, Andy Kim
2D Animators: Ara Devejian, Chad Howitt
FX Artists: Brian Alvarez
Lighters: Chris Eckardt, Brian Broussard, Matt Berenty, Jin Choi
Compositors: Matt Lavoy, Ryan Bozajian, Miguel Bautista, Chad Howitt
Flame Artists: Thibault Debaveye, Alex Kolasinski, John Shirley

Music/Sound Design: Leonard de Leonard
Arranger: Leonard de Leonard