METAphrenie designs and produces HD animations promoting new Reebok training shoe Zigtech
The London-based agency Glue selected METAphrenie for the company’s Zigtech campaign, which featured the tagline: “Reezig. The energy drink for your feet.” The campaign was designed to promote Reebok Zigtech, a new training-shoe with a revolutionary zigzag sole. The unique geometric sole converts the wearer’s downward leg energy into forward propulsion, thus reducing wear and tear on the runner’s key leg muscles.
“For this campaign, we needed to create a product showcase, which could ‘live’ as an interactive piece at www.reebok.com,” says Andrea Dionisio, creative and managing director at METAphrenie. “This showcase had to demonstrate the five major features and benefits of the new Zigtech shoe--energy boost, lightweight, flexible, stable, less wear and tear, and a 360-degree solution.”
Each METAphrenie-created animation showcased on the Reebok Zigtech Web site starts and ends at the same point, allowing for each video to be stitched together. The site opens on a still image (a 3D render) of the Zigtech shoe, and then depicts hot links at key locations on the runner’s body, so that a visitor to the Web site can then select a video of that specific product benefit to watch.
The company had a schedule of 3.5 weeks to complete the campaign.
Dionisio adds, “Everything we did on this project was in CG. The shoe was entirely created in 3D, as were the athletes wearing them. We used motion capture to produce the natural running animations. The original data was then modified to depict the athlete’s start and stop at specific points. The athlete was not the focus of the spots, and was made to fade into the background at specific points. The athlete character was used to showcase the shoe action, and make it believable for viewers.”
The METAphrenie Reebok Zigtech project was produced in HD, and will be featured on in-store video screens, as well.
Amr Mohameed Abdel-Hamed, CG supervisor for METAphrenie, says, “One of our challenges with this assignment was to ensure the trainer was as photoreal as possible, while visually maintaining the balance between the ideal product and the real shoe.”
Adds METAphrenie art director Giuseppe Ambrosio, “Since the project was produced in HD and then down-sampled for the Web, we had to make sure that all of the details in the textures would still work, and would remain visible at the lesser resolution. Our schedule for this project was also very tight, and we had to produce eight animations for a total length of over two minutes in just a few short weeks.”