Creative Credits: Top Spot of the Week

Shoe gets special shot in Puma spot from Gyro Worldwide.

Client:
Puma

Production Company:
Reactor Films, bicoastal, Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, directors; Salvatore Totino, DP; Chuck Ryan and T.K. Knowles, executive producers; Bart Lipton, producer. Shot on location.

Agency:
Gyro, Philadelphia. Steven Grasse, creative director/producer; Billy Ghoat, copywriter; Shymala Joshi and Rosh Nort, art directors.

Post:
Nomad/Whipping Post, Santa Monica, Calif. Eric Zumbrunnen, editor.

Music/Sound Design:
Sound Furnace, Venice, Calif. Damien Wagner, composer/sound designer.

"The Six Million-Dollar Man meets Mentos" is how creative director Steve Grasse initially described "Chase" to directing learn Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris. That and some TV and film clips, were enough to spark a good-guys-vs-bad-guys atmospheric story for the duo's first ever spot.

Grasse, president/creative director of Philadelphia-based ad agency Gyro, which created the :30 "Chase" for Puma, first met the directing team during the 1996 MTV Video Music Awards where Dayton Faris' "Tonight, Tonight" clip for the Smashing Pumpkins walked away with a sack full of trophies. Gyro, already working on the Puma spot, quickly enlisted the duo from bicoastal Reactor Films.

"Chase" opens in the sterile white interior of a laboratory, where scientists, sporting while lab coats with matching bubble hoods and club-kid yellow goggles, gather around an experiment. A drop of neon liquid is dropped into a Petri dish. The result sparks a wide-eyed reaction from one of the scientists. A syringe is then used to insert the neon liquid into a shoe.

Next comes the testing of the slice. Two Olympic athletes are quickly shown: Linford Christie runs on a giant hamster wheel, while Jonathan Edwards runs and jumps to superhuman heights.

Futuristic guards, patrolling the lab's exterior, are then ambushed by a pair of evil scientists dressed solely in black, who break into the lab and steal a cylinder of the neon substance. But one of the scientists in white, as all his colleagues lie unconscious on the floor, straps on the experimental shoes and runs after the cylinder.

The bad scientists ride a motorcycle down a long hallway, but the man in Pumas gains ground. As the motorcycle exits the building-and the shot-the good scientist, who has caught up with it, takes a dive in its direction. The shot freezes with him in mid-motion and the Puma Cell logo onscreen. The spot, which has no dialogue, instead features techno-inspired music.

"Most of the elements in the spot were put in there [by Dayton Fans]," said Grasse. "We never thought of bad guys, but they did. We sent them a collage of different images, which were a lot of things from 2001, a lot of things from The Six Million Dollar Man and a lot from music tracks we liked."

"Chase" was shot in three days at different locations. The lab shots were filmed in a room used to lest satellites at the Rockwell Defense Center in Orange County, Calif. LAX airport also served as a set; the testing segment was shot at the departures gale of American Airlines there.

The use of athletes probably better known to Europeans than Americans was attributed to the spot's intended international placement. "Since it's an international spot, [Puma] wanted us to put in people like Linford Christie, who is a big star overseas," Grasse said. "So we worked them into the spot. If you knew who they were, it was an added thing.

"What we didn't want to do was anything that Nike or Adidas or people trying to be Nike do, which is athlete-driven spots," he continued. "This is more about athletes in the spot for legitimacy [of the athletic shoe]. It certainly doesn't drive the creative."