New Balance - 237 Launch

Mcfaul+Day approached us to work with them on the launch campaign for the new New Balance 237. The 237 is a modern day tribute to the brand’s signature silhouette for the 1970s. The design of the animations needed to represent this, as well as be consistent across all of the various colour ways. The project consisted of two parts, a hero film showing the shoe coming together, and 6 shorter animations for the various colour ways. Working with the team at Mcfaul+Day we created a retro feel, that has a modern glitchy twist to it. The warping in the animation is a custom effect we created that emulates a warped piece of glass moving in-front of the camera, creating distortion to the show itself, as well as bending and splitting light. The shoes were all filmed on set by filmmaker Richard Luxton. He used a track to keep a consistent movement in and out of each shoe. We smoothed out the movements and time remapped them to get the exact zoom in we wanted. Whilst on set we took the opportunity to capture HDR images of the lighting and environment to be used as lighting for the CG sections. For the hero film we photo-scanned the trainer. This required us to photograph the shoe from as many angles as possible to built a complete picture. We then used Agisoft Metashape to complete the photogrammetry process. From this we generated a model that was highly accurate, but had a very dense mesh. In Cinema 4D we used this model as a base shape to rebuild all the parts, panels, and stitching of the shoe. We could then pull the shoe apart and animate it coming back together. To light the shoe we used a HDR image we captured at the shoot, and used custom materials to texture the shoe as accurately as possible. We rendered the film using Arnold render, and composited everything together in adobe after effects. We worked with a team at Spark + Rumble to develop the sound scape and effects.