Psyop Creates “Hu Jia” for Adidas and 2008 Beijing Olympics

When Psyop directors Marie Hyon and Marco Spier were asked recently about the this campaign for Adidas..The aesthetic we were going for was to create something really epic. Not in the loud, over the top kind of way, but something understated, intimate, but big at the same time. This is why we’ve wanted to create the world of live action mixed with pencil. It seemed like the right mix of mediums to shape our campaign because of the blend of live action, for the athlete’s recognizability and human emotion, along with pencil, which has a softer delicate quality, creates a look that is quite unique. But with this mixture of techniques, we faced many challenges. We had a lot of work ahead of us. First off, we spend weeks preparing for our shoot in Beijing by previsualizing all the spots. Because the mixture of live action and animation needed to be absolutely integrated, we have to plan out all our shots so that we were very well prepared. We then flew to Beijing to shoot the athletes over the course of six weeks. The biggest challenge that we faced was to create the right mixture of live action and pencil. We wanted to avoid the dizzying look of simply a pencil filtered video effect, as in an A-Ha video of the 80s. The clients felt the emotions and facial expressions were very important to them so we wanted the look not to distract from the human emotion and the story. By having too much activity of hand drawn lines, we were losing focus. The delicate balance of all of these things was our greatest challenge. For us, we feel the technique pushes our boundaries of “impossible is nothing”

Adidas: “Hu Jia”

Production Company: Stink/Psyop
Directors: Marie Hyon and Marco Spier, Psyop
Executive Producers: Justin Booth-Clibborn, Psyop and Daniel Bergman, Stink
Producers: Lucia Grillo, Psyop and Mungo Maclagan, Stink
DOP: Alex Melman
Associate Producer: Nathan Jew, Psyop
Assistant Producer: Kay Chen, Psyop
Psyop:
Lead TD: Pakorn Bupphavesa
Designers: Kim Dulaney, Marie Hyon, Joshua Harvey
TD: Alvin Bae, Bashir Hamid, Chris Bach, Damon Ciarelli, Ted Kofsatis, Tony Barbieri
VFX supervisor: Theo Maniatis
Modeling/ Rigging: Lee Wolland, Kitty Lin, Anthony Patti, Rie Ito, Jaye Kim
Animators: Ian Brauner, Justin Burton, Nicholas Johnnides, Gerald Ding, Eddy Estevez, Chris Santoianni, Jae Ham, Jed Mitchell, Melanie Tonkin
CG: Mike Papagni, Rich Magan, Pete Hamilton, Helen Choi, Anthony Patti, Tatchapon Letwirojkul, Andreas Berner, Pat Porter
Massive: Joerg Liebold and Dave Barosin
Compositors: Matt Hanson, Bee Jin Tan, Elliot Blanchard, Borja Pena, Eric Concepcion, Makoto Sato, Theo Maniatis, Aska Otake,
Joe Vitale
Tracking: Hyunjeen Lee and Seung Hyung Lee
Lead Roto Artists: Leslie Chung, Joshua Bush
Roto Artists: Joseph Oberle, David Marte, Carlos Rosario, Tiffany Chung, Will Frazier, Max Kornev, Rich Pernice, Jelena Vukosav, Alejandro Monzon, Kristian Mercado, Stefania Gallico, Jess Mireau
Editor: Cass Vanini
Assistant Editor: Brett Goldberg
Cell Animation: Boolab
Audio Post: Sound Lounge
Music Production: Q Department

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