At first you think it's just some innocuous sneaker sitting on a New York pier - forgotten on the way back from a pick-up game and destined to find its way to the bottom of the Hudson or draped over a telephone line. Then something happens. Something strange. The shoe starts to change. It writhes and tears, cocoons and evolves, and mutates into many different forms until a brand-new shoe, the Nike Huarache 2K4, is revealed.

For "Evolution", the latest brainchild of Wieden + Kennedy, Portland, the client wanted more than just a slick spot to show off the attributes of its latest sneaker. The goal, says Rodney Knox, director of communications for Nike basketball and football in the US, was to demonstrate that the Huarache is "very innovative, but it is also a shoe that has a heritage." There were eight shoes that the Huarache derived from, and Nike wanted to show them all.

To tackle the brief, W+K called on newbie director Neill Blomkamp of The Embassy, Vancouver/Spy Films, Toronto (see Boards, April 2004. After a spec spot caught W+K's eye, he was signed up to direct last year's Nike "Crabs", done entirely in photo-real CG, which in turn caught the attention of W+K producer Jennifer Fiske.

Fiske's treatment for "Evolution" required just the kind of realistic approach Blomkamp had used, so she phoned him to discuss the project. Blomkamp says they were working on the spot by the end of that same day. "I knew we could do it," he says. "The only reason I would think we couldn't was if there wasn't enough time."

The only problem, Blomkamp realized, was going to be creating a natural transition between each shoe. "You can't just morph it," he explains. "Every single piece of leather on every single shoe has to do something. It has to move and accommodate the next piece that comes in." Blomkamp and his SFX shop The Embassy did pre-visualization testing for each transition, which they then sent to Portland and to the client for sign-off. The pre-viz alone took almost half of the seven weeks allocated to the project.

In the end, it was the geometry of the shoes themselves that suggested the best transitions, notes Blomkamp. The Nike Hyper Flight, which looks like a Venus Flytrap, tears back to reveal the next shoe in the sequence. The '92 Huarache, whose colored heel makes it look like a flower, blooms into the next reveal.

Blomkamp used Lightwave 3D for the photo-realistic animation and then composited it against a still frame background in Shake. The final look is anything but sterile CG. Says Blomkamp, "I wanted people to not really know what the fuck was going on - if it was time lapse, or if people had torn the shoes apart and then stop-motion-animated them.

I wanted it to look as though the surfaces and the materials were real.... [Although] you'd need about a year to do that in stop motion."

In the end, the hardest part of the spot was the final reveal, where the next-to-last shoe becomes thickly cocooned in laces that tear away to show the Huarache 2K4. "There was a lot of discussion over the cocoon," notes Blomkamp, "because obviously the Huarache is the product and it needed to arrive in kind of a more impactful way than the others. It was almost like a birth. It had to open up and explode its way into the world."

The birth was typical of the way in which the clients thought of the project, recalls Blomkamp. The director says that Nike put far more weight on the importance of the shoes and their historical context than the graphic treatments. Case in point was the still against which the spot was composited. The next-to-final version of the spot had lighting changes which reflected a chronological series of stills taken in New York at various times of the day. The effect underlined the time-lapse quality of the spot, but Nike wanted the light changes dropped because it didn't want effects distracting from the shoes as the central focus.

"The shoe itself is a story," adds Nike's Knox. "Peeling off shoe by shoe all the shoes that are part of the Huarache was graphically a great way to bring that story to life."

Credits

Client: Nike

Agency: Wieden + Kennedy, Portland

Executive Producer: Ben Grylewicz

Copywriter: Jason Bagley

Art Director: Brad Trost

Agency Producer: Jennifer Fiske

Production Company: The Embassy

Director: Neill Blomkamp

Music/Sound Design: Elias Arts

Sound Designer: Jay Nierenberg

Sound Mix: Jeff Payne at Eleven

Nike> http://www.nike.com

Spy Films> http://www.spyfilms.com

The Embassy> http://www.theembassyvfx.com

Wieden+Kennedy> http://www.wk.com