Counter Climate

We seamlessly mixed physical and digital CGI elements to provide a believable visual treat that inspires. Rather than make the viewer wonder how the film was made, the Chuck II Counter Climate becomes the hero and concentrated direction of the new features show the stand-out innovation for the Converse stable.

The animatic film concentrates on timing and camera motion to build the overall story of a shoe that can aptly handle anything a thundering metropolis evening can throw at it. The backbone of the audio for the film is varied ambient sounds of Wetropolis: the rain on the asphalt and stone, the sizzle of neon, the background audio of passing vehicles, and wind whipping at metal street signs and fabric. Edit points punch in to illustrate close-up details of the new features of the Chuck II Counter Climate. As visual direction orbits around our the shoe, we speed ramp into jump-cuts. The overall theme of the film distorts and varies frame-rates throughout—giving the film a stop-motion and hand-crafted believably. For lighting we sourced neon signage, weather and environmental HDRI elements employing back-lighting, light shards, and atmospheric debris to build a moody, strongly back-lit frame.

Rain elements like beading water under various lighting conditions were tracked and composited together over a CG base Chuck by our team of leading CG artists. Everything was measured accurately against the real-world material properties of the new Chuck II Counter Climate. The flotsom and jetsom that we experience in a large metropolis street scene provided some wonderful opportunities for irreverence like a plastic takeout bag slapping into our hero.  We track the feature text into the scene by suspending it in “reality” next to our Chucks features, inter-playing with reflections and shadowing and. Other text elements include playing with the environment’s weather, like whipping away in the wind.

To accomodate various media plans and placement, we built assets at a high-resolution, for reproduction on printed and digital platforms. This also includes camera framing: building a wide, full-frame aspect for our renders that work in both portrait, and landscape cropped roll-outs, built over-sized to facilitate any cropping and re-sizing for media options.