Nike 'Playmaker'.

Director Daniel Wolfe has been something of a regular fixture at Prime Focus recently, posting both his recent promos for Duffy here. So we were delighted when he came back with his latest project - a viral for Nike - and especially when he told us he was shooting with the RED camera and wanted to post the spot at 4K.

The viral puts the viewer in the dressing room of an amateur football team. The camera moves over the team and captions appear over each player, describing their flaws and character traits - which explains why it is so difficult to organise a team. Nike Playmaker is the answer to this problem - a website which teams can use to organise their matches.

Director Daniel and DoP Tom Townend brought in the footage from the shoot as data, which we imported straight into our Baselight suite at 4K. The pictures were amazingly crisp and full of detail. Prime Focus Senior Colourist Simon Bourne was charged with coming up with the look for the viral. Daniel, Tom and Simon have worked together before on many occasions, and have a fantastic collaborative relationship. A smoke machine had been used on set to diffuse the harsh lighting of the dressing room, and Simon was keen to enhance that slightly misty feel - primarily to help give the piece a more filmic feel and to ensure it didn't feel too much like video. He worked with the 4K pictures, which had captured every detail of the players and the set, to give the viral a very gritty, real look.

Once the client was happy with the grade, Simon output the selected overlength 4K plates from Baselight into Flame, where they were conformed by Dan Lorenzini. Directed by Daniel, Lorenzini added the camera move in Flame, and then created and tracked in the text, animating it where necessary, and tracked the animation into the whiteboard shots. The finishing touch was to create the seamless transition back out of the whiteboard into the dressing room.

Considering the huge amounts of data which were being sent around the building, the whole project went remarkably smoothly, and special mention should go to the backroom data management team, who managed the data transfers without a hitch.