The largest advertising campaign New Balance has ever produced
MPC New York
Senior Producer
The Ask
MPC was approach in 2015 to take on the largest advertising campaign New Balance has ever produced. The video was filmed across three continents and features 17 of the brand’s sponsored professional athletes, including runner Jenny Simpson and baseball star Miguel Cabrera.
The brief was to re-create the scope of the sandstorms from breakout film of the summer ‘Mad Max’. The footage was predominately shot against greenscreen, so we needed combine real world cloud tank elements shot at 100 frames a second at 5k and computer generated cloud simulations.
Approach
We brought together a large group of Houdini artists who began R&D on the exterior of the storm, exploring its movement and developing its look. A key part of the agency brief was to have the storm mirror the structure of a wave, which proved to be challenging as the Houdini simulations were based on real world physics and scale. The rendered simulation would often produce quite random results, each one being totally unique.
This was easily one of the most complex visual effects productions I’ve ever produced but I’m extremely proud of the final result and the countless hours of hard work from the team involved.
Making of