A look inside Nike LunarEpic Flyknit Summer

A couple months back, we featured this very inspiring collaborative case study about the Nike LunarEpic Flyknit shoe campaign. Today we are featuring a comeback on this project with Tendril and Blacklist and their supreme work with the team at Nike.

We are welcomed into the next level that the team brought to the table and make sure to watch the process video as well. We just can’t imagine how much freedom they had from such a big brand and how technical challenges they must have encountered. While watching the video, I just can’t help to notice how incredible is the sound. They have built a procedural noise-based curve animation tool that replicates and expand on Cinema 4D’s MoSpline.

In this second phase of Nike's LunarEpic launch campaign, the shoe has arrived on Earth bringing with it otherworldly powers. Roads curve and stretch seemingly into infinity. Impossible runs suddenly feel effortless. Gravity is nonexistent.

Watch the Process

This was our sixth project with the amazing team at Nike. Working with them and Blacklist, it was our task to take Nike's creative strategy, and then conceive and develop a narrative and visual structure for the brand film around the tagline 'run forever'. The manifestation was a 45s film and sound design (created by CypherAudio), key print and digital 'hero' visuals, social media clips and a large-scale track and field dome installation. The process with Nike is always incredibly collaborative and exciting. From there, the macro surface knitting effects were also prototyped and build in Houdini over the course of a couple weeks and then rendered in Arnold. The bending and warping landscape sections also took quite a bit of RnD to get right. In the end, we used a blend of multiple World Machine displacements and Xgen scattering in Maya. The laser-cutting sequence also posed its own set of puzzles, which we solved in Cinema4D using an arcane stack of deformers and morphs.

Credits

• Client: Nike
• Global Brand Communication Studio EP: Noah Stanik
• Global Brand Communication Studio Producer: Meagen Moore
• Global Brand Design, Running Art Director: David Brady
• Global Brand Design, Running Studio Manager: Denise Wild
• Production Company: Blacklist
• EP: Andrew Linsk
• Producer: Karen Lawler
• Production Studio: Tendril
• Co-Directors: Chris Bahry of Tendril, Tom Crate of Frame
• Executive Producer: Kate Bate
• Producer: John Szebegyinszki
• Storyboards: Greg Boychuk
• Editor: Tom Crate
• Pitch Concepts: Chris Bahry, Evaldas Cesnavicius, Wojtek Szklarski
• 3D Artists: Alasgar Hasanov, Alexandre Veaux, Florent Arnould, Christoffer Bjerre, Marcelo Souza, Will Sharkey
• FX: Alasgar Hasanov, Marcin Porebski
• Lighting and Render: Alexandre Veaux, Marcelo Souza, Christoffer Bjerre, Lorne Kwechansky
• Additional 3D Artists: Christian Hecht, Ben Pilgrim
• Compositing: Chris Bahry, Alexandre Veaux, Lorne Kwechansky
• 2D Animation: Leo Mateus, Marissa Godwin
• Music and Sound Design: John Black of CypherAudio

More information: http://tendril.ca.