Adidas ‘#OriginalSuperstar’ feat. Pharrell Williams

Adidas Originals’ #OriginalSuperstar campaign (2015) stars Pharrell Williams alongside five inspirational creatives he handpicked as his own Original Superstars. Directed by Tom Martin for Elastic, the introductory spot — the first of many in the motivational campaign — brings together American hip-hop star Pusha T, Russian actor and director Grigoriy Dobrygin, Mexican illustrator and graffiti artist Smithe, Chinese multimedia artist VJ Mian and Japanese genre-defier Yoon. Six voices, six faces, six streams of creativity — all individuals united in their commitment to creating for an audience of one, the true calling card of an Original Superstar.

SCANable captured full-body 3D scans and 4D data of each “Superstar,” along with the adidas Superstar Foundation shoes themselves. That LiDAR and photogrammetric capture produced the measured geometry and texture behind the visuals running throughout the spot.

Photometric capture and the skin problem

Advertising puts faces at a size film rarely does. A campaign portrait is graded, retouched and reproduced at scale, and a digital version of that face has to hold up in the same company.

The difficulty is not geometry. It is that skin returns light two ways at once — a soft diffuse response from below the surface, and a sharp specular response from the oil film on top. An ordinary photograph fuses them, and any texture built from it carries baked highlights that fight every lighting setup afterwards.

Cross-polarised photography separates the two. What comes back is a relightable texture set that behaves correctly under whatever key the art direction eventually lands on. Photometric capture exists for exactly that problem.

The product is a character

A shoe in a footwear campaign is not set dressing. It is the reason the film exists, and the audience knows what it looks like better than they know most of the people wearing it.

Hero-object capture is therefore held to a stricter standard than most set work. Stitch pitch, the shell toe’s perforation pattern, the exact break of the leather — those are recognisable details, and a modelled approximation gets caught.

Scanning the physical sample removes the argument. The digital shoe is a measurement of the real one, rebuilt with clean topology and sensible UVs for whatever the spot asks it to do.

A pose is one frame of a person

4D capture records a subject as geometry that changes over time rather than a single frozen instant. It is the difference between a statue and a performance.

For a campaign built around individual creatives, that distinction matters. Gesture, weight shift and the way someone actually carries themselves are as much a likeness as the face, and a static scan cannot carry any of it.

4D capture produces a moving mesh sequence rather than a rig driven by animation. Nothing is interpreted — the movement is measured, the same way the surface is.

Further brand and spot work is worth a look, as is the full service list.