To promote the new James Harden Adidas shoe launch, Set Creative took over Footlocker's midtown Manhattan special event space NYC33 for a slam-dunk contest / 1-minute skills challenge.
The idea and the event came together quickly: invite ballers, high school players, bloggers, and influencers to jam on a heavily-stylized half-court and get branded, sharable videos in their hands as fast as possible after they walk off the court.
Front of house, greeters used our custom iPad app to check in players and simultaneously create database records for fitters to pull shoes and shirts, and to create correlated records for the post team to coordinate distributing the finished assets.
For the video shoot, we crewed up with a full film production team, a 5-camera rig (with jib and overcrank portrait cam), running ISOs to decks back of house where a 3-person post crew cut down edits. Simultaneously, our DP cut the show to the in-house LED screen - a nice detail in the background of key shots.
Edited reels were piped through custom 'glitch' software with loads of shaders written to match the client's mood boards of a black and white, grainy, crushed and contrasty look with all kinds of analog and digital glitches timed just so to emphasize key moments in the action.
From the 'glitch station', we pushed finished assets up to our custom web services that created a styled microsite for each video, sent the player a text with a short-link, and delivered them a copy of their reel attached to an email for easy sharing from iOS to Instagram (an important edge case).
The system ran like clockwork, and the finished assets exceeded expectations by all accounts, in no small part to Ed David's exceptional DP work. Check the vids on this page to see some of our favorites of the 130 cuts we delivered over 3 days of madcap shooting and editing.
Huge thanks to the amazing client, Set Creative, for the vision and trust to go big. Special thanks to Adam McClelland and the post crew for the overtime assist and for fitting it all in.
Production Company: Hard Work Party
for Set, Adidas, and Footlocker
Technical Direction, Systems Engineering, Software Development and Realtime Processing: Noah Norman
Backend Systems and Server Architecture: Chuck Reina
Postproduction Supervisor: Adam McClelland
Editors: Andrea Cruz, Shaheen Nazerali
Director of Photography: Ed David
Producer: Zack Tupper
Camera Operators: John Meese, Andrew McMullen, John Larson
1st AC: John Larson
DIT: Justin Hartough
Gaffer: TJ Alston
Electrician: Jordan Bell
Key Grip: Alexa Hiramitsu
Best Boy Grip: Brandon Barron
Production Assistants: Kyle Smith, Kyle Ostrom
Creative Direction and Additional Animations: Set Creative
December 2016
