Nike: Factory is the largest and most impressive project I've ever heard of that is never going to be seen by anybody. It was a huge undertaking and it was completely finished and ready to go. The project was rendered entirely at film resolution and was meant to be shown in movie theaters before a main feature.

The bulk of the effects and 3D work was done at The Embassy in Canada, but the overflow shots were taken care of by myself and one other artist in Los Angeles.

It was a fabulously pleasing project to work on, mostly because I was allowed to do whole shots by myself, which engenders a very strong sense of 'ownership'. It pleases me to be able to point at the finished shots and say "That's what I do. That's the quality of my work." Not that I do say that anywhere except here, on this page. But still. You know what I mean.

The theme of the spot is that we are in an unimaginably vast factory that is producing endless robotic clones of Nike's highly paid sports stars. (Don't ask me why because I don't know. It looked 'cool'. Is that reason enough?) Unfortunately, as it was explained to me (and of course this could easily be bullshit), the finished spot was shown to the brass at Nike, and one of them said "But doesn't this make all of our expensive sports stars look like they're mass produced?" And so that was that. It was shelved, never to be seen again.

The reason the images on this page aren't higher res is the same reason that prevents me from having the whole spot here for you to watch: it was never released to me or to anybody else. Because of this you're going to have to make do with a paltry three stills from some of the shots I did. The merest soupçon of the finished article, I'm afraid.

I took this shot through from inception to completion, including the final comp. I made the objects, textured them (although the arms use photo based textures, not painted), animated it all, lit it, rendered it and comped it. So that'd be every last little thing, then.

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In this shot the environment below the dark cyan(ish) coloured girders in the lower half is real and shot on set. The rest is 3D. Those of you who know what my surname is will be able to spot it concealed in this image.

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This is another shot that I did everything on, from start to final comp. The player's head was supplied to me and was, I believe, generated from a 3D scan of the player.

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