Gatorade Fierce ‘Face Off’ Featuring Bryce Harper

Gatorade Fierce ‘Face Off’ featuring Bryce Harper is an animated spot from TBWA\CHIAT\DAY and Mill+ where every move creates a stunning liquid reaction. Directed by Mill+’s Paul Mitchell, the 2014 commercial shows athletes dominating their opponents in abstract stadiums — Gatorade’s first animation-based campaign and a fresh approach from both a creative and technical standpoint. To build the fluid effects, The Mill’s team combined HDR capture, witness cameras, a motion capture shoot, and body scans, ultimately treating the liquid as a character in its own right with a lighter-than-water, magical behavior that allowed more dramatic visuals.

SCANable provided full-body 3D scanning of the athletes and object scanning for the production, delivering accurate, correctly scaled digital models that helped The Mill’s artists craft the powerful, fluid-driven visual effects behind these crescendoes of sporting moments.

An athlete is captured in a specific physical condition

A professional athlete’s body is not a generic body. Muscle definition, mass, and posture are the product of a training cycle, and they change across a season.

A full-body scan records that condition as measured geometry rather than as an artist’s impression of it. When a CG version has to intercut with live-action coverage of the same person, the set of the shoulders and the way weight sits on the frame are what an audience recognizes — long before anyone reads the face.

Capturing on the day the campaign shoots is the only way to get the body the campaign actually filmed. Digital doubles built from that data start correct instead of being corrected.

Drift between passes

Nobody holds perfectly still. A capture method that sweeps around a subject, or takes several passes, accumulates drift from breathing and micro-movement.

That drift lands as soft geometry in exactly the places that need to be sharp — the edge of a jaw, the line of a deltoid, the fold where a sleeve meets an arm.

Simultaneous array capture removes the problem rather than correcting for it downstream. Every camera in a CyberSCAN™ array exposes at once, so the subject is frozen in a single moment and no reconciliation pass erodes likeness. Cyberscanning covers the method, and our Mobile CyberSCAN Studios bring the array to the shoot rather than asking talent to travel.

Hero objects have to survive a close-up

Advertising puts products in frame at a size feature film rarely does. A bottle, a shoe, a can, a piece of equipment — these fill the screen, and the audience already knows what they look like.

Object scanning produces geometry with the real proportions and the real surface, so a digital version cuts against product photography without anyone noticing the swap. It also gives an effects team a solid, correctly scaled collision surface when the object has to interact with simulation.

Scanned objects ship after retopology, UV layout, and render-ready builds, matched to the receiving vendor’s naming and unit conventions.

See more commercial work across the campaigns we have supported.