Client: New Balance Soccer
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Agency: AC&M Group
Creative Director: Manolo Guajardo
Art Director: Walker Coral
Account Executive: Steven Marques
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Production Company: Remedy
Director / DP: Josh Sliffe
Producer: Austin Simmons
Gaffer: Brian De Contreras
Grip: Logan Bennett
Production Assistant: Tim Cheek
Still Photography: Cole Gorman
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Talent: Tobacco Road FC
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Post Production: Remedy
Lead Edit: Josh Sliffe
Music Licensing: Musicbed

In the modern game of soccer, players cover more ground over the course of a single game than any other sport. New Balance saw this as an opportunity and expanded their product line to include soccer boots to be used by players all over the world.

For the launch of their latest cleat, the Furon 2.0, New Balance needed to play up the impressive design and construction of their product. Since it’s soccer, we knew we wanted the piece to be high energy. For us, this meant handheld, quick cuts, saturated color, hard light, and a front and center sound. We also wanted to show the player’s experience as best as we could— the sweat, the struggle, the discipline, and the reward.

The only problem was, we only had 4 weeks from when the concept was presented to when the spot needed to be delivered.

We decided we wanted the piece to show all that goes into the sport.  We didn’t want a day game with fans in bleachers kind of look. We wanted to go to the places the fans don’t get to see, that only the players know about, and we wanted it to all culminate into a sort of late-night pickup game for the gritty look and feel.

To fill it out, we needed to find around 20 players. Since most professional players/teams have gear sponsorships that interfere with projects like this, finding players that weren’t sponsored, but were still good enough to be in the spot, was gonna be tough. Not to mention asking them to play in the dark, blinded by bright lights, with soccer balls flying by their heads, for hours in the humid July of North Carolina.

Soon enough we found our stadium, an awesome local semi-pro team (Tobacco Rd FC), the New Balance gear was in the mail, and we only had days to get the crew ready and gear prepped.

On the night of the shoot we had 6 hours to dress the locations, position the lights, get the players dressed, film some individual set ups, and finally get them out on the field for the game footage. We kept the stadium lights off and used the HMI’s we brought in to keep the environment dark and moody. We shot mostly handheld with an easyrig and occasionally used a gimbal rig when there was time. It was a lot of finding good moments, setting up quickly, and drinking water, but we got everything we needed plus a little more.

The edit was pretty straight-forward minus one hickup. Some of the New Balance branded gear never arrived in the mail in time so our players had to wear the shorts they had, competing logo’s and all. This meant in the edit we had to go in and track out each player’s individual clothing whenever a logo came into frame. Not a big deal. Just took more time.

We knew it was going to be hard, especially since we hadn’t done much work in this space before, but we couldn’t be happier. These are the types of projects we’d hoped to be doing back when we started, so it's great to see this type of work become a reality for our team!