4 Effects Spots - Nike Air Force 25 Launch

Hey all,
I just finished work on 4 effects pieces created for Nike's launch of the Air Force 25 basketball shoe.













The spots were done through the Brand Design Media department at Nike's world headquarters in Beaverton, OR. Myself and 2 other guys did the brunt of the effects work for these pieces (roughly 80 effects shots), and our art director also helped out with compositing as well. We completed the work in roughly 2 months.

The pieces feature NBA players Carlos Boozer, Amare Stoudemire, Al Harrington, Jermaine O'Neal, Emeka Okafor, and Nate Robinson. The players were filmed on a small green screen stage; we tracked the shots then created and composited in all the backgrounds. Be sure to check out the "breakdown" on the linked page to get a taste of where we started with the original footage, and how we got to the finished product.

Everyone that worked on these pieces was great and did a wonderful job. Don't forget to check out the and the full list of credits on the linked page.

As always, comments and critiques are more than welcome!!! Thanks all!

Russell Hirtzel

The link you posted is wrong. Here's the correct link:


Really cool work!!! I liked the breakdown too-- does that hanger actually exist and you just textured photos onto the 3d geometry? Also, what problems did you have integrating the players into the scene? What solutions did you come up with? LOOKS GREAT!!!

~Mechis

I'm amazed.. looks stunning.. man it would be nice to have a little tut on how this was achieved.. tracking etc..

really great piece of work..

in what program was this made.. keying and composite?

thanks mechis,

Hey guys, welcome to the forum, and great work! Those are some really nice, finished peices. And two months for all of that isn't too bad a timeline either. Good to have more compositors around here to balance out the load a bit.

-Z

hey all,
Thanks for the great comments! I just happened upon simplycg a little while back and I'm really diggin the forums here so far. There are many talented people around here!

Back on subject though.... Sorry I haven't responded for a while, I started freelancing up at Digital Kitchen in Seattle about a month ago, and have been slammed ever since so I haven't have much time to check around on forums. But anyway, don't think I'll be able to put together a tut on this project Artflame Noir, but here's a brief description of what/how we did the spots:

For all the 3D we used Maya. The majority of the texturing was accomplished with a few matte paintings. We noticed most of the footage was centered around the "key" of the bball court, and our CG set would only been seen from a few main vantage points, so it made sense to just use a few camera mapped matte paintings for the bulk of the texturing. We basically just set up 3 locked off cameras (one looking toward the back wall, one looking toward the window wall, and one looking toward the wall with the hoop on it) then used renders from those camera to create matte paintings. Obviously that technique wouldn't work for most projects, but for this one it seemed like the right technique and actually ended up saving us loads of time.

All of the compositing was done in After Effects.

We also tracked all the footage. For that we used Syntheyes. It's a good program... it doesn't seem to get as much recognition as Boujou, but it does an amazing job, and personally, I'd use Syntheyes over Boujou for most things (but that's just a personal preference).

We also used Photoshop for pre-viz/conceptualizing the environment...


that's it in a nutshell. Thanks again for the great comments!

Hey man thanx... even if not a tut, it's a nice info on the workflow of it..

grats again

really cool stuff! nice work!

thanks hype!