State Farm ‘Hawks and Hornets’

‘Hawks and Hornets’ is a 2015 State Farm commercial from the sitcom spoof ‘The Hoopers,’ starring NBA stars Chris Paul and Kevin Love. In the spot, directed by Bryan Buckley with visual effects by The Mill, Los Angeles Clippers guard Chris Paul walks into his teenage son’s bedroom — the son played by Kevin Love of the Cleveland Cavaliers — announcing it’s time they have the talk, book in hand: ‘The Hawks & The Hornets.’ Kevin shuts the door on him, only to relent when Chris mentions that their State Farm agent will add him to the family’s car insurance plan when he’s ready to drive.

SCANable provided a 3D body scan of Kevin Love for the ad campaign, capturing the measured likeness data used in the spot’s computer-generated effects.

An athlete is a difficult subject to measure

Professional athletes are not built like the population a generic body model is trained on. Limb proportions sit outside the usual range, and muscle definition creates hard shadow boundaries and steep surface changes right where a scanner needs continuous data.

Standing still is also harder than it sounds. Nobody holds a pose perfectly — breathing alone moves the chest and shoulders by several millimetres over a few seconds.

Simultaneous array capture removes that problem instead of correcting for it afterwards. Every camera fires in the same instant, so the reconstruction describes one frozen moment rather than an average of several. That is the basis of cyberscanning as a method.

Sitcom lighting hides nothing

Comedy is shot bright and flat. There is no shadow to lose an imperfect edge in, no atmosphere softening the frame, and the camera sits at conversational distance for most of the running time.

Genres that light hard put the highest demands on a digital human, because the lighting itself provides no cover. Anything approximate in the geometry reads immediately.

The response is not more cleanup — it is better source data. A digital double built from a complete capture starts correct and stays correct under whatever the spot’s lighting does to it.

One capture, a campaign’s worth of work

Advertising campaigns rarely stop at one execution. A successful format returns with new scripts, new set-ups and new edits, often across more than one season.

A properly built scan is reusable in a way a shot-specific fix is not. Clean topology, sensible UVs and correct real-world scale mean the same asset serves the next spot without being rebuilt, and the likeness stays consistent across every execution the campaign produces.

That is largely a question of how the data is finished. Our modeling and asset preparation is what turns a capture into something with a shelf life.

See more brand and spot work, or browse the full service list.