Air Force 25 - Harrington vs. Oniel

Let me say right off the bat to be sure and check out the “Effects Breakdown.” It helps to demonstrate just what we had to work with and how we got to the final product.

 

These spots were created as part of the much celebrated launch of Nike’s Air Force 25 basketball shoe. Each spot features different NBA stars engaging in gritty one-on-one mach-ups.

 

The way it worked was, I was part of a three man team that handled the majority of the effects work for all four pieces. All in all we spent roughly two months from conceptualizing the digital warehouse to finalizing the last shot. The players were shot on a small green screen stage via 16mm film.  It was then our job to place them into their final digital environment.  I managed all the 3D assets and was in charge of: lighting, shading, rendering, and syncing up the 3D cameras created via tracking to the 3D scenes. I also helped out on conceptualizing the environment. The final environment design was created by Brian Merrell. Brian also created some incredible matte paintings that were used via projection mapping for the texturing of the environment. The compositing was masterfully handled by Marshall Bex, who also did all the camera tracking in Syntheyes. The creative director, and source of much inspiration and guidance for the design and execution, was Manny Bernardez.