Follow up on Simon Robson for Adidas

Following our post of the new Adidas spot from Simon Robson (Nexus Productions), Simon was nice enough to shoot over a bit more about the piece, including some story board frames and a link to a quicktime version of the spot.

A few notes on the making from Simon:

We only had 4 weeks in production which was really tight as you can imagine.
My storyboarding and pre-production time was extremely tight too, only about
8 days prior to production. What this meant was that when the crew arrived
there was still a lot of design to be done. Cass and Mario pitched in really
well on design duties. We three worked together for the first week coming up
with what the two teams, ‘Predator’ and ‘F50’ could look like. Mario took
inspiration for the Predator sections (The red and black ones) from Vasarely
and general constructivism. Cass approached F50 (Green) with more of an
organic, flowing key line type of feel. After a week we had our design
directions which we pulled across all the animation. Most of the 3D was done
in 3DS Max by the awesome Jerome Haupert. Other 3D elements such as grass,
trees, and ‘jumping sound blocks’ were done in Maya paint effects by Sean
Yue and myself. 2D animation like Dillon’s comet and Sean’s ‘hands’, plus
all compositing was done in After Effects. The bird in the park scene was
drawn and animated by Antoine Baurruel on every second frame, then
composited in After effects and filled with the Paint Bucket effect to give
it the luminescent quality it has.

The team worked incredibly hard, with work over flowing into very late
nights and week-ends. And the result is a 60 second spot that myself and the
client are extremely happy with. It’s a testament to the power of great team
work.

Check out these storyboard frames:
Arrow through defense
Bird and player
Bird to man
Football is heroes
Header
Original football precision idea
Quake sequence

Simon also sent along a list of the crew, who did an amazing job:
Agency: 180 Amsterdam; creatives: Stu & Ed, production: Cat
Production Company: Nexus Productions
Director: Simon Robson
Lead animation / art direction: Cassiano Prado & Mario Sader
Lead 3D: Jerome Haupert
3D support: Jonny Plummer
Animation: Shaun Yue, Dillon White,
2D animation: Antoine Baurruel, Kwok Fung Lam
Technical Direction: Ben Cowell, Darren Price
Production: Isobel Conroy, Julia Parfitt
Studio management: Theano Kazagli
Sound design & composition: A-Bomb

Thanks to Simon for passing all of this on to us!