AMIRI — Pacific Flat

This was a VFX job where I felt like a fireman or something. My friend Jeff Prosser, a really talented director who’d been working in-house for AMIRI, brought me on for a 15-second spot for the Pacific Flat sneaker: one shot, one room, one model, except she keeps multiplying. The camera punches in on a shoe product detail, pulls back out, revealing another clone of her in the room. Repeat a few times. The way this effect is most easily done is with motion control: the camera repeats the exact same move every take, and the clone versions can stack more cleanly. We did not have motion control. They did do a great job with choreo, spacing, lighting consistency, and human camera operating. But it was still a crack-them-knuckles, grind-those-fingers post job!

The set was a beautiful sunken 1970s couch arrangement. My gorgeous nemesis. Zooming in on a foot stepping onto the ground would have been its own kind of challenge. Stepping onto a couch means the ground deforms. The cushion sinks, the seams bend, and every version of her had to press into the same fabric seeming at the same time. Those seams were a gift and a problem in equal measure: a grid I could line everything up against, and a grid the viewer could line everything up against too. Nothing could be smudged over while it was in frame. It became puppet tools and compositing stacked on compositing in After Effects, solve one problem, inherit a new one, layer on layer. If you saw under the hood… “bruh.”

The other half of the job was the timing. I retimed her walks take by take, then match-moved my digital zooms to the real camera operating, so the shot could hand off from a real push to a built one and back without you feeling the seam. There is one step where I had to splice her leg so her shin and foot are footfalling from one take and her other leg and upper body are from two other shots. I really hope you don’t know which one that was. This being a high-fashion ad, the product fidelity was not negotiable. Every one of those layers had to hold up at the resolution where you are admiring a shoe, and feeling the brand’s emotional benefits.

The final output is 15 seconds and looks effortless (unless you’re also a VFX artist). It’s right here and it’s short, just watch it. I’m glad Jeff called. The job inspired me: when I later creative-directed a campaign for a small fashion label called Field Journal, the first setup I wrote was a duplication moment. Check it out here.