How To Make A Commercial For Adidas? This Is How I Did It!
Have you ever dreamed about making a commercial for Adidas? Then this is the article for you!
A few years ago, I was asked to visit the Adidas headquarters in Herzogenaurach, a small town in the middle of nowhere in Germany. The trip's goal: pitch my creative vision for an Adidas commercial for a global diversity campaign.
The project was called 'Breaking The Glass,' referring to the metaphor of a glass ceiling—representing an invisible barrier that keeps a given demographic (typically applied to women and ethnic minorities) from rising beyond a certain level in a hierarchy.
In this blog post, I wanted to share how to make a commercial for Adidas by breaking down this project step by step. I will tell you how this project landed in my mailbox, the challenges we had to overcome, and how we eventually brought this Adidas commercial to life.
Enjoy the ride!
Table of contents:
How the Adidas commercial project started
While wrapping up an online commercial for Absolut Vodka, I received a LinkedIn invite from a creative director at Adidas. I accepted the connection and exchanged a few words on the Linkedin chat.
The creative director told me he had followed my work since my career in the music festival aftermovie genre and had noticed my transition to the commercial world.
being presented with a unique opportunity
He worked at the Adidas headquarters in Herzogenaurach, where he was tasked with overseeing the creative direction of a diversity commercial and asked me if I would be interested in directing this project.
Of course, I was super excited and saw it as a unique opportunity to work for one of the world's biggest sports brands!
Shortly after, the project details landed in my mailbox, we briefly had a chat on the phone discussing the do's and don'ts, and I started contemplating how to visually bring this project to life.
The initial Adidas commercial storyboard.
The Adidas Commercial client brief
Like any other project, this Adidas commercial started with a client brief—a short description of the project, its goal, budget, creative requirements, and how the final video would be used.
the Adidas commercial project’s goal
The goal of this project was to help convey the brand message that every single employee, regardless of race, age, gender, ethnicity, religion, or sexual orientation, is welcome to become part of the company and can go on to change the world of sports for the better.
The finished product had to be delivered within two months because it was going to be used during a global diversity presentation by the CEO of Adidas at headquarters in Herzogenaurach.
A creative collaboration
The project team had already invested a lot of time, money, and energy to create a detailed storyboard for this commercial, which included a storyline about several athletes in a dark black-and-white setting who, by performing their sport, break through a glass wall.
Under the guidance of the creative director, the project team was now looking for a film director to elevate their initial ideas to new heights, so I was asked to share my director’s vision for this commercial.
The storyboard was still more or less the main direction, but I was allowed to divert from it and give my own interpretation of the project’s storyline.
The Adidas commercial behind-the-scenes video.
My director’s vision for this Adidas diversity commercial
As with every commercial, different directors were asked to bring their creative vision for the commercial to the table. As a result, I needed to pitch my ideas in a so-called director's treatment.
These digital pitch documents are the industry's entry ticket for getting the job as the commercial director. Packed with text and eye-catching imagery, the purpose of a director's treatment is to give the client a better understanding of what they will get in exchange for their production budget.
Adding more narrative to the commercial
Regarding the concept of this commercial, I pitched the idea of adding a more subtle narrative to the project instead of just capturing a bunch of athletes looking into the camera, performing their sports, and breaking through a glass wall.
In my director's treatment, I outlined the idea of creating a story in a dark, surrealistic, underground setting where different athletes, all representing minority groups, had to conquer faceless figures representing privileged society, to shatter a taboo and 'break the glass ceiling.'
I wrapped up my ideas in a director's treatment, and together with the producers, I flew to Germany to present my ideas in person. Twenty-four hours later, we flew back home again with a GO for the project.
A few pages of my original director’s treatment for this adidas commercial.
The Adidas commercial pre-production
While the producers started scouting film studios, crew members, and film gear for this production, cinematographer Aziz and I started breaking down the story into a proper shot list.
the film studio Issues
What became apparent very quickly while making the shot list was that capturing a sports commercial in a completely dark studio environment was not ideal.
The first reason was that all the shots would look pretty much the same with a black background. The second reason this was not ideal was that we needed background references to portray something that moves.
In simple terms, a car can go fast, but you hardly notice its movement if the background always stays the same. The motion suddenly becomes apparent if you can show the vehicle is moving on a road or in front of a location.
The power of art direction
To help us avoid this issue, we concluded that we needed a few simple background elements for reference to convey the actions we imagined.
The art direction team built a set of four fake concrete pillars that we could easily move around to help achieve this effect.
The visual effects team would extend the pillars in post-production to suggest that this project was filmed in a massive underground location.
The second piece of the puzzle we had to solve was breaking glass in a safe, easy-to-repeat construction.
Again, the art direction team came up with the idea of building several different wooden frames for different sizes and types of glass and plexiglass.
Together with the visual effects team, the art directors and the cinematographer discussed the correct dimensions for the frames and did several tests to discover if the construction worked.
Breaking the Glass
The visual effects artists assured us they could digitally create shots that involved cracks, so we only had to focus on the shots of breaking the glass on the film set.
Funny enough, as easy as it sounds to break glass, the material is designed to take a lot of force. Therefore, the glass wouldn’t break initially, so the art directors had to find a way to stimulate the breaking.
Eventually, they drilled several screws in the frame touching the glass panel to stimulate breaking if something hit the glass with force.
From the beginning, the creative director at Adidas told me that he wanted this project to be shot in black and white, which I liked very much!
the challenges of filming in black and white
The challenge of filming in black and white is that every color becomes a different shade of grey on camera. Once we started doing camera tests in black and white, we discovered that the colors we expected to look great turned out completely different.
So, to find which colors worked best on camera, the stylist and I used our iPhone camera with the black and white filter to scan the Adidas clothing collections online and find the best items for the shoot.
Eventually, we discovered that most neon colors worked best in black and white, resulting in a bonanza of colorful outfits for the cast members on set! Neon yellow and blue shirts in combination with neon orange shorts, etc. It looked hilarious!
finding The athlete cast
With all the production assets in place, there was one final obstacle we needed to overcome—the cast.
Where you usually hire actors or professional athletes to fulfill this part, the creative team of Adidas insisted on using actual Adidas employees to strengthen their message.
The downside of this approach was that we depended on Adidas employees who voluntarily signed up for this project. So, the evening before the shoot, I was introduced to the employees who took a day off to participate in this commercial, some of whom had never performed these sports before.
I was up for another difficult challenge…
A camera overview for the boxing and soccer player setting. Made with Shot Designer.
Filming the Adidas commercial
Together with the first assistant director, we broke down the entire project for three consecutive days of filming to ensure we stayed on schedule and captured everything we needed to make this story come to life.
If you’re interested in seeing this breakdown, you can download the breakdown of this project here for FREE!
Three days of Adidas commercial filming
Filming this Adidas commercial took place at a film studio in Amsterdam.
I always like to start with the most extensive setups and then scale them down production-wise.
This meant starting with the boxer because this sport required an entire boxing ring and lots of additional lighting to be installed in the studio. On the second day, we planned to film a soccer player, and on the last day, we planned to film a weight lifter.
During all the days of filming, the Adidas creative team joined us on the film set.
The film producers had set the creative team up with their own reference screen to follow our progress without interfering with the crew’s reference monitor next to the film camera.
One of the producers joined the Adidas team during the shoot and would update me now and then on the creative team’s thoughts and opinions.
the challenge of Directing non-actors
Besides all the politics, technical, and productional challenges this project involved, I also had to find a way to trigger the right emotions from the non-actors who had never stood on a film set before and were not real athletes.
To do this, I had to find an easily relatable emotion that I could queue on set and trigger the correct response.
As a white male in western society, I realized that I had never experienced hitting a glass ceiling in the way Adidas wanted to portray it. On the other hand, I was familiar with rejection.
So, on the night before the film shoot, when I was introduced to the cast members, I talked them through my career journey and how I encountered rejection over the years.
I took this approach because I knew that everybody experiences rejection from time to time and that this usually comes with anger and frustration.
I told the cast members that during the shoot, I would ask them to envision the people from their past saying to them that they couldn’t do it and use that anger while performing the sport.
It turned out to be the perfect direction eliciting the perfect emotion for the non-actors on camera!
The Adidas commercial post-production
After we wrapped the film shoot, the post-production of this diversity commercial began.
Editing the Adidas commercial
As I enjoy editing myself most of the time and the fact that we didn’t have the budget left to hire an external editor, I decided to slice this commercial together myself in my editing suite using Adobe Premiere editing software. Looking back at this project a few years later, I realize I should not have done that.
Over the years, I have learned that it’s better to outsource the editing when directing a project because an editor can look at the raw footage objectively and decide to kill some darlings if it doesn’t contribute to the story.
They don’t know how much time, money, and effort it took to make that particular money shot and therefore are not as emotionally connected to the raw footage as I am.
Nonetheless, I had to cut this project myself from scratch, and because we didn’t record any audio, I edited the project based on the story flow of the images.
Unfortunately, I was so emotionally invested in this project that I had a tough time editing and eventually asked cinematographer Aziz to help cut through the jungle of footage.
Adding a Custom-made soundtrack to the commercial
Eventually, we found a good rhythm for the story, and I sent the project to the music composer who built a custom-made soundtrack for this commercial—inspired by Hans Zimmer’s soundtrack for The Dark Knight.
Once the composer was finished, I finalized the edit with the custom-made film score in place and sent some shots to the visual effects artists to create the broken glass effects.
In the meantime, I joined the sound designer in his sound recording studio to add an additional layer of audio effects to create a raw, underground feel.
adding The finishing color palette touch
For the finishing touch, the color grader gave the images a raw look based on the black-and-white work of legendary photographer Anton Corbijn.
To provide Fernando with the perfect references, we used several photography books from Anton Corbijn to highlight and pinpoint specific reference elements.
After two and a half months of blood, sweat, and tears, the project was finally finished and saw the light of day at a big company event at the Adidas headquarters in Herzogenaurach.
Conclusion
After I had finished the Adidas project, I thought getting new clients would be easier because I had worked for such a major brand, but the exact opposite became a reality. A long period of silence followed, resulting in lots of self-doubts and living on the edge of bankruptcy.
Luckily, small jobs, like social media campaigns and other mundane projects kept crossing my path from time to time, which allowed me and my company to stay alive and floating.
When the coronavirus took over the world in 2020, I decided something had to change in my approach. I could no longer continue on this same unfulfilling and destructive path.
Something had to change dramatically if I wanted to stay sane and live without money struggles for the rest of my life.
building an online business
During the coronavirus lockdowns, I walked away from the filmmaking industry for the time being. I went full steam ahead in building revenue streams that allowed me to make money via a different route.
I started reading many books about building a successful (online) business, mindset, investments, and (online) marketing.
In this article, you can read how this adventure started and how I eventually turned this website, the one on which you are reading this blog article right now, into a money-making platform that allows me to make money while I sleep.
