Social Stunt

Foot Locker.

Date

2024

Client/Agency

Foot Locker/Tool of North America

Role

Concept & Creative Direction

Foot Locker wanted to create a social moment that would stop people mid-scroll and make them genuinely question whether what they were seeing was real. No massive budget, no big production, just a tight concept executed well enough to make people look twice.

The Challenge

The budget ruled out shooting our own footage, which was my first instinct since controlling the base plate is the most direct path to making CG feel believable. Instead we had to work from stock footage, which meant the footage would dictate the concept, not the other way around. I spent a lot of time finding clips that actually had potential, and eventually landed on a bridge shot in New York and an elevated rail structure in Chicago. Once those were locked, I concepted around what we could do in each scene that felt physically believable and still had that larger than life quality.

We used trending shoes so there was instant brand recognition, but the shoes being massive and appearing in impossible places was the whole point.

16:9 Films

The Approach

Early on I pushed to get animatics in hand quickly, not just to time the shots but to start working on VO and sound design. That's what was really going to sell it. The visuals needed to look real but the audio needed to feel real, like someone pulling their phone out on the street because they just saw something they couldn't believe.

The original plan was to use VO actors but I pushed back on that. It would have sounded too polished, too commercial. Instead I had people at the studio record themselves on their phones while walking outside, so the background noise, the breathiness, the spontaneity all came through naturally. I directed the tone and the scripts with Foot Locker but the performance needed to feel unscripted.

The CG was handled by a great team out of France and having a strong 3D background myself made the feedback loop a lot tighter. I knew what to ask for and how to describe it.

The New York scene went through a significant pivot. The original concept had the shoe being dropped by a helicopter onto the bridge while someone happened to be filming. But working through animatics and early renders it kept feeling off. I re-concepted it so the helicopter is never seen, just the ropes swinging out of frame as the shoe lands, as if someone had just turned their phone on a second too late to catch the whole thing. That change made it feel far more believable because it matched how people actually film things, reactively, catching the tail end of something rather than the whole event. Sound did the heavy lifting there too, the helicopter audio fading, the shoe hitting, the person's reaction.

9:16 Films

Visual Exploration

The Outcome

The clips launched on Foot Locker's social channels and were among the most viewed, liked, and commented posts that month, which for a brand with Foot Locker's reach and posting volume is saying something.

Jeff Levine

Fake-Up

Creative Director, Designer & Artist