Nike Spread 02

Nike was impressed with the first shoot that I did. Then they decided to do another one for the ACG line just for Newman magazine. I went to sneakerfreaker.com to search for any info regarding the line. It was very comprehensive cos' they also cover the interviews from the makers, its origins and how you can utilize your kicks.
So for whatever info you need regarding sneakers, they're your hookup. Initially I was told the ACG line was designed solely for water use. I remembered seeing some optical illusion way back when I was working for AirAsia but was unable to implement the idea. They weren't that keen on exploring and pushing design ideas for the magazine. It needs to be safe, as long as the text is readable and design is so-so. Blehh.. This is the image that I planned to use for the idea. The digital artist from the studio and I spent hours discussing and drawing the pattern to experiment how to slip this inside the fashion spread.

• To make it transparent in the background cannot work cos' its not obvious enough.
• To use the pattern and alter the objects to leaves would require too much time and work. Not favorable to magazine dateline
• To switch the patterns to fishes would require us to shoot fishes separately in different angles.In the end, 2 factors stopped us from executing it, the rights for the wave pattern, which is from this japanese professor. His website is here, with more optical illusion to zone out to. And also the ACG line is not solely for water use. I was quite persistent to use the water effect. So I came up with another idea to shoot the models underwater just to get the lighting that forms only when you are underwater. We have Azwin Andy, good-looking muthafucker and all-time undisputed state swimmer from the band called Estranged, Raoul from One Buck Short, Arafah a.k.a Arabyrd and also Zher Peen, NTV7 host. It doesn't help that this spread is rushed out from the start, the studio doesn't have the camera housing, we have a budget to adhere to so we can't rent scuba equipment and also the apparels came in later than expected. So the dateline for this shoot is pulled all the way back to end of month. In the end, we rent the entire Bukit Jalil olympic size pool stadium from 7pm to 7am. And even that we had to negotiate the timing and the availability in order not to compromise the olympic swimmers training. Fucktards. We start shooting with Andy, pure logic and common sense, since the guy is a state swimmer. He was very versatile as expected, doing poses that we set for him. But it is Arafah that really surprised me with her agile and flexible poses underwater. Its fuckin America's Next Top Model shit in freakin Bukit Jalil! I think she did over 100+ poses. We knew how difficult it is to pose and breathe underwater but she managed to pull it off beautifully, between intervals of course. We had 3 assistant underwater on standby just incase shit happens. Its 18 feet deep by the way. The photographer and I stood by a small plastic window that is built underwater so we can shoot without being in the pool. Yeah, its damn easy for you, chillax-ing in the dry cubicle so the rest have to work their asses of underwater. Fuckin wrong wei. I had to run up and down, to the pool and below the pool just to direct the models to pose. Imagine there's 4 models doing over 300+ poses, how many times do i need to run up and down the stairs to tell them how to pose? They not exactly trained models. Just ambassadors for Nike's ACG line that are going the whole nine yards just to get the shoot done. Kudos to them, I say. After the shit I put them through, he he he he...... We finish the shoot by 4am. Even the client were there for support all the way. The beer gut that I had? All gone and toned by the end of the night.

We insist they put on goggles to see where they're heading or the directions they have to swim to, for the lighting above to cover them. The second day was done with the same clothes and poses that we initially chose. Just this time we superimposed the faces with the body shots in the pool. We had the makeup artist to imitate sea life patterns on their faces. We will apply fish scales on them in Photoshop. All thats left is the digital imaging. IFL studios, known for their superb skill in Digital Imaging, had only 3 days to pull of the fastest D.I for 4 shots with background in the history of Photoshop. Usually for fashion spread, heavy D.I is a big no-no. But in my case, I had to rely on D.I to pull off the entire spread.
I wasn't very happy with the final outcome of the spread given the tight schedule before the magazine goes to print. We tried our best, even not sleeping to finish the spread. The one image that I wasn't happy about was the end page, in front of Shibuya. When applying digital imaging, one needs to think logically on where the light falls, or is the depth of field correct? You can see models are flying all over the place, but models that is way back, the least to be seen, needs to be abit blurry to show depth of field. You can't be far away and still look sharp and clear. It doesn't gel with the background either, with the background being blurry and the model super-clear. Plus the D.I looks fake, even cartoonish on the last shot. Well, whatever's done, is done. We just learn and move on.