THE STORY
In this second phase of Nike's LunarEpic launch campaign, the shoe has arrived on Earth bringing with it otherworldly powers. Roads curve and stretch seemingly into infinity. Impossible runs suddenly feel effortless. Gravity is nonexistent.
Working with Nike and Blacklist, it was our task to conceive and develop a narrative and visual structure for the brand film around the tagline 'run forever'. The manifestation was a 45s film and sound design (created by CypherAudio), key print and digital 'hero' visuals, social media clips and a large-scale track and field dome installation.
FILM
STILLS
PROCESS
Each of the scenes had its own unique technical challenges. In the opening Flyknit section, we wanted to bring something new to the table visually and build a procedural noise-based curve animation tool in SideFX Houdini that replicated and expanded on Cinema 4D's 'MoSpline'. From there, the macro surface knitting effects were also prototyped and build in Houdini over the course of a couple weeks and then rendered in Arnold. The bending and warping landscape sections also took quite a bit of RnD to get right. In the end, we used a blend of multiple World Machine displacements and Xgen scattering in Maya. The laser-cutting sequence also posed its own set of puzzles, which we solved in Cinema4D using an arcane stack of deformers and morphs.
