Famous Footwear
Fresh Family
Director Liam Chapple - Carbon
Agency mcgarrybowen

Case Study

Carbon

  • Director Liam Chapple
  • Executive Creative Director Liam Chapple
  • Production Executive Producer Derek Goldstein
  • Producer Lauryn Grimando
  • Producer Jenna Gabriel
  • Head of CG Frank Grecco
  • CG Irene Kim-Ahiska
  • CG Doug Litos
  • CG Eric Concepcion
  • CG Kevin Lu
  • CG Carlos Dandoval
  • CG Piotr Glabinski
  • FX Artist Ryan Hussain
  • Compositor Paulo Dias
  • After Effects Michael Relth
  • After Effects Max Benjamin
  • 3D Scanning/Stills Neil Burger
  • Scanning/Stills CUBO

External

  • Client Famous Footwear
  • Agency mcgarrybowen
  • Chief Creative Officer Kurt Fries
  • Group Creative Director Lara Herzer
  • Creative Director Mike Wegener
  • Group Managing Director Cindy Hicks
  • Account Managing Director Tracey Glibowski
  • Account Executive Alice Agassandian
  • Executive Producer Mark Olson
  • Senior Producer Justin Lee
  • Producer Madison Amalfitano
  • Director, Business Affairs Joann Baker
  • Senior Content Business Affairs Manager Alica Townsend
  • Senior Music Producer Brandy Ricker

Carbon was pleased to team up with mcgarrybowen to craft a lively and dynamic campaign for Famous Footwear. Directed by Liam Chapple, the brief called for animated, photo-realistic shoes to pair with a fun, flashy stop-motion aesthetic, all of which popped on the colorful stylized paper backdrops.

To be able to achieve accuracy during the short duration of the project, we used 3d scanning techniques to obtain an acute level of detail, otherwise hard to achieve using strictly traditional modeling. We scanned a myriad of shoes in several phases to maximize detail within all the individual parts, ultimately combining them into a single model.




We scanned a variety of looks for the shoelaces to add range and to allow for their neutral state to look as realistic as possible. In one particular instance, we needed the laces to animate from untied into a bow. This proved challenging as it required a combination of traditional rigging techniques and clever transitioning from one scan to the next.


The shoes featured across the spots within the campaign are specific, so we wanted to make sure the palette of the shoes worked in harmony with the colors of the backgrounds. We utilized a previsualization process to employ basic lighting and rendering to circumvent any usual issues with trying to communicate our ideas with crude viewport rendering. This was crucial in accelerating and simplifying the review process with both the agency and client.


A particular sequence of note shows an ocean wave made up of hundreds of puzzle pieces. This was a challenging FX task as it straddled the line of simulation and manual keyframing, all while having to still feel plausible within the constraints of “stop-motion.” Our talented FX lead, Ryan Hussain, provided an elegant solution in Houdini, which we optimized so it could easily repeat with minimal overhead when it made its way into Maya.

Though some bits of creative ultimately didn’t make it into the final spots–think an array of cookie dough balls baking themselves into cookies after playing musical chairs–the entire process was a joy, and we were stoked to have worked with such great teams at Famous Footwear & mcgarrybowen.