Undeterred by the sudden death of a job in the middle of R&D, the motion crew at Alchemy in London pivoted their efforts into this spec spot for sporting goods brand Salomon, designed to “showcase the team’s conceptual, edit, and technical skills in one place.”

Andrew Milner, EP at Alchemy: “We set ourselves the challenge of creating a high energy fusion of Salomon’s fashion, technical and outdoor credentials – blending the distinctive colors of the trainer with a pared back palette and the organic materials of the natural world it was built for.

“The big creative challenge was to feature the shoes in some organic way, trying to achieve a new look and feel that combines strength and lightness. We ended up with this strong contrasted visual, where the environment is black and white and the only colors that pop are the shoe’s: light blue and purple.
 

“The big creative challenge was to feature the shoes in some organic way, trying to achieve a new look and feel that combines strength and lightness.”

 
“We have a few organic shots at the beginning with the purpose of driving the viewer into the Salomon world: the product’s main features of being strong and light are translated into flowing rocks and fluids. The initial build up creates a strong tension which is then released once the shoes jump and flow in the air, smoothly distorted to show how versatile the product is.

“From a technical point of view, we experimented a lot to find the right look and feel. Using Redshift and Cinema 4D we achieved what we wanted, cranking up the motion blur to create this beautiful trail left by the shoes. We then combined it with the same animation with no motion blur, in order not to lose detail.

“We used Insydium Taiao to create the flowers, grass, and plants, then animated with Cinema 4D mograph tools. The big technical challenge was the crack in the ground where we had to combine physical simulation with mograph animation, having the flowers being born and emitting particles from the petals.

“For this shot we used the Voronoi Fracture object to generate the cracks. We then made a specific mograph selection to be able to control precisely the rigid body simulation. We used Insydium Xparticles to emit particles once the petals are born.”
 
 

 
Production: Alchemy
Director: Alchemy