Shilo's Faster Than a Speeding Bullet

Shilo, Under Armour Collaborate on the Notion of Speed

By Anthony Vagnoni

What does breaking the sound barrier look like?  More specifically, what does it look like when you do it in an athletic shoe? 

That was just part of the challenge that the designers and animators at New York and L.A.-based Shilo confronted recently in an energetic new spot for Under Armour, the Baltimore-based maker of athletic apparel that’s a fast-rising challenger brand to global giants Nike and Adidas.  The spot introduces the brand’s fastest generation of football cleats, the UA Fierce, and debuted July 13th on ESPnulls YouTube Channel.

Titled “Fierce Speed,” it starts out with a dark and ominous sky, specked with clouds and rumbling with thunder.  An object crosses the horizon, moving so fast it leaves just a streak of light.  We see it next in close-up, as bits and pieces of it flake off. Is it a bullet? A space capsule?  Actually, it’s a cleat—the blunt-edged spike that screws into the sole of shoes athletes wear when playing American football.  As it races across the sky, the cleat rotates around and lands squarely in the bottom of an Under Armour athletic shoe, which quickly transforms into something resembling a space ship, which is then adorned with the distinctive overlapping UA logo before blasting off into the cosmos.

All this in thirty seconds.  Fast enough for you?

As described by the studio, the commercial represents a dramatic fusion of football, space-age technology and science-fiction. Its original score, courtesy of Gavin Little of Echolab, enhances the futuristic theme by weaving the familiar sounds of a football game with the supersonic frequencies of sound-wave.

“Fierce Speed” is the second spot that Shilo has produced for the company in the past few months.  Earlier this spring, the studio produced “Instinct Fast,” which stars the speedy Jose Reyes, an infielder with the New York Mets baseball club.

In an interview, Shilo Creative Director Andre Stringer and Executive Producer Tracy Chandler said that they enjoyed the intimately collaborative nature of working directly for the client, which handles all of its marketing and advertising in-house.  “They have a total and thorough understanding of their brand and of their consumer,” says Stringer.  “It’s always about authenticity, and about how the athlete relates to the product. It’s a very straightforward process.”

The assignment reunited Under Armour Creative Director Marcus Stephens and Art Director Brian Boring with Stringer and Shilo’s Associate Creative Director, Noah Conopask, who collaborated previously on the “Instinct Fast” spot. For this new effort, Shilo also recruited the skills of 3D supervisor Chris Fung to produce the spot entirely in CGI, creating its science-fiction feel and tone.  The original HD content seen in the spot was modeled and animated by Shilo’s artists using Maya, and After Effects was used for final compositing.

“Given the objective of telling the story of the fastest shoe on the market, we sat down together and brainstormed on how to be visually innovative,” says Stringer.  “By using visual metaphors to explain speed, this new spot hits UA's marketing objectives while also presenting a fresh approach to the category.”

Stringer says that the brief was pretty much that—how to convey the concept of speed, given the brand’s claim to be the fastest football cleat on the market. UA’s willingness to explore visual approaches that were not tied to showing athletes opened up a wide range of options.  “This is a more interpretive concept,” Stringer notes.  “It was about finding the right visual metaphor for going really fast.” 

The design team at Shilo played with a number of ideas, including the thought of what it’s like to break the sound barrier.  Video clips on the web of fighter jets breaking the sound barrier often show the planes bursting through a cloud of vapor as they reach Mach speeds.  While the spot is all CG, Stringer says they took pains to create the visuals rooted in a sense of photo-realism—imagining what this would look like if it were really happening.

“Our goal with the film was for it to knock viewers out of their chairs when they watched it, so it had to be super intense,” adds Conopask. “We also wanted it to feel like it was born of and infused with speed and the high-paced action that is out on the field during a football game.”

Credits for Shilo also include executive producer Tracy Chandler, producer Amy Fahl, editor Nathan Caswell, lead artist/3D artist Christopher Fung, additional 3D artists Joji Tsuruga and Christina Ku, 3D modeler Youngmin Kim, VFX artist Warren Heimall, compositors Bashir Hamid, Christopher Fung, Joji Tsuruga, Dorian West, Joel Voelker, Tamir Sapir and Will Decker, and assistant editor Hedia Maron.  Arthur Portnoy is Shilo’s EP/Head of Sales.