Nike ‘Just Do It’ 25th Anniversary: “Possibilities”

‘Possibilities’ is Nike’s 2013 anniversary spot marking 25 years of ‘Just Do It,’ created with Wieden+Kennedy and directed by MJZ’s Nicolai Fuglsig. The epic 90-second film, cut seamlessly by editor Angus Wall, follows six stories of young athletes reaching the pinnacle of their abilities — and celebrating what it feels like to beat the pros. VFX house a52 crafted everything from the CG fireflies accompanying a runner on her morning jog to an explosive Hollywood action sequence and the massive crowds cheering on Piqué, Serena, and LeBron.

SCANable provided LiDAR scanning and 3D modeling for the production, delivering accurate point-cloud data of locations used for camera tracking, CG crowd placement, and background environments throughout the spot.

Six stories, one visual language

A film assembled from unrelated locations reads as a single piece only if the invisible work behind it is consistent.

That is a capture discipline before it is a compositing one. Every location handled with the same instruments, the same conventions for scale and origin, and the same standard of coverage produces data that behaves identically downstream — so a crowd system, a tracking setup, or a lighting rig configured for one sequence transfers to the next without being rebuilt.

Where methods vary from location to location, the seams surface in the edit as a change in how solid the world feels.

Backgrounds carry more of the frame than the hero

Attention goes to the athlete. Credibility comes from everything behind them.

A stadium bowl, a street, a training ground — these occupy most of the pixels and almost none of the audience’s conscious attention, which is precisely why they have to be right. An error in a background is never noticed as an error. It is felt as a general sense that the image was constructed.

Environment capture is the least glamorous line on a bid and the one that most reliably decides whether a finished spot feels photographed. Our set and location scanning covers it.

What a point cloud tells a compositor that a photograph cannot

A reference photograph records appearance. A point cloud records position.

That difference sets the ceiling on what is possible in the shot. From a photograph an artist can match color and lighting; they cannot place an object at a known distance, occlude it correctly behind a real surface, or know how large it should be at a given depth.

Measured data answers those questions numerically. It is what lets a CG crowd fill the correct seats, an added element sit behind the correct railing, and a camera solve converge rather than drift. Assets go out after modeling and scan cleanup, and the full service list has the rest.

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