ADIDAS soccer shoes – social clips

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ADIDAS soccer shoes – social clips

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Convincing CGI close-ups

An in-house visualization department at Adidas planned on expanding their portfolio with integration of CGI into real-live footage, targeting social media platforms. Since they were lacking the expertise for that kind of visual effects, they asked me to come onboard and help them produce a first effect for a YouTube clip: a virtual close-up of a new soccer sport shoe in action.

For this project we worked with The Foundry Modo as our base 3d-package, considering this was the company’s tool of choice at the time. Luckily, I was granted some time to familiarize myself with the software before production started, since I did not have the chance to work with it before.

After I felt confident enough to work with the new tool, we got to work on processing the 3d-assets of the shoe and soccer ball and modeled and rigged part of the foot and leg to be more free in choosing the camera track later on. In this instance unfortunately, we did not get a chance to be present on set while the live-action part was shot and had therefore no chance to discuss the needs of the vfx crew with the director and camera operator. In the end, we were given the final footage and some clean plates of the background. With this little information to go on, we had to rebuild the lighting used on set manually and do quite some compositing in Aftereffects to make it work.

HDRI stitching

For the production of the following two clips some months later though, we got flown to London to be on set for the shoot and do some proper vfx set supervision after all.

We came prepared with a high-resolution digital photo camera and a gimbal to create a stack of images from the surroundings, later to be stitched together to a spherical HDRI with PTGui. The result helped a lot with quickly illuminating the assets convincingly and saved a lot of time that otherwise would have to be spent in additional post-work.

Advantages of on-set work

My client was very happy, both with the look and feel of the shoes at close range and the slo-mo animation and integration into the live-footage.

It is always great fun to be able to work on set for a production, especially when this is happening in such a great place like London. An amazing and lasting experience!