JD Sports Xmas Ad

JD Sports Xmas Ads

The Neighbourhood
Role: Motion Designer, compositor and Editor
Client: JD Sports
Production Company: The Neighbourhood

 

When working at the Neighbourhood this was probably one of the biggest undertakings we had ever taken on. We approached JD Sports to design and produce their Christmas ad campaign in 2015. They liked our ideas and early designs and were keen to work with us to create their campaign. In the space of just over a month we were asked to design and create three 30 second TV adverts along with 20 x 10 second for TV and social media. These all featured different shoes and apparel from their winter collection which was only confirmed a couple of weeks before delivery.

After helping produce work to help us win the job we set our sites on the visual aesthetic of the whole campaign. We wanted to create a winter wonderland that all the models would be in clothes in that seasons new gear. We scaled up the team to meet the demand and this meant that once more (like Centre Point) that the whole studio would be working together. The models were filmed using rigs on set which we then tracked before taking them into Autodesk 3DS Max. This is where all of our 3D renders were made before the comping was done in After Effects and Nuke. We then edited the final pieces in Premiere where we did out final grade and audio work.

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Mens 30 Second TV Ad

After the wardrobe was finally picked we could then set about figuring out each sequence and how we were going to include all the brands. Once this had been done we could then get then select the models from JD’s roster and film them all against greenscreen. Once we had the footage there was a lot of work to be done as each shot had to be fully tracked, roto’d, animated and comped. The amount of times we had to repeat this process meant we had to be on point and collaborate to the best of our abilities. It was truly inspiring to see how all members of the team / studio came together to produce these. We were ambitious in what we wanted to do but we were determined to deliver creatively on what we had envisioned and to the highest standard we could.

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Womens 30 Second TV Ad

At the same time as creating these ads for the UK and Ireland we were also creating Hi-res imagery that could be used in their print campaigns also. It was great to see how nationwide the campaign became as it started appearing on billboards, newspapers and wherever there were screens. I’m proud of what the team managed to achieve on this where there were a lot of moving goalpost and curve balls being thrown into the mix. It was also great to work with the same camera crew that we used for The Corinthia film which meant everyone knew how each other worked and the most efficient way to get these across the line.

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Juniors 30 Second TV Ad

For me, this was a huge opportunity as I managed to work on multiple aspect of the job from tracking and modelling through to the edits and mastering. It was great to be able to work on the pitch and proving ourselves right through to delivering the final output the to the TV stations. I’ve never worked on timelines as stringent as these but I don’t think I’ve ever worked on a team more dedicated in my career. Here is a technical breakdown of how we produced the ads. As you can see there were a lot of different passes involved with a lot of different processes. The hardest part was the amount of times we had to repeat the process to get all the ads done in the time scale.

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JD Sports Technical Breakdown
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