adidas 'Breaking the Glass' Commercial

This Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull inspired project for Adidas was used for an internal diversity campaign - breaking the glass - at the Adidas Headquarters in Herzogenaurach, Germany.

The project was built around the subject: ‘a glass ceiling’, a metaphor 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.

We filmed this project over the course of three consecutive days in a film studio in Amsterdam with a cast that consisted solely of Adidas employees. They had never performed in front of a camera before, and some had never even done the sport they had to portray on camera… Quite an experience!

Filming a project about breaking glass without actually using glass was also a rare occurrence. We used a big plexiglass plate in a custom-built construction combined with lots of visual effects to make it look like the athletes were actually breaking the glass with their performances.

The underground basement feel was created with custom-built look-a-like wooden concrete pillars, and the visual effects artists extended the sets to make it look like the place was enormous.

You can read the full story here, including the possibility of analysing all the original documents used for filming this commercial.