Concept: At the time, Nike Dunks had become a symbol street culture. We wanted to make a piece highlighting that these shoes were designed to be skated. 

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Challenge: To use Ai with authenticity, control and storytelling intention to draw the connection between sneaker designs and the wear and tear of skateboarding. 

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Solution: We used Ai in two unique ways. The first way was to do Ai motion capture. Utilizing videos of our favorite skateboarders, we were able to extract their animation from 2d videos and transform it into 3D animation data for our characters. Skateboarding style is so individual, using any other approach would have lacked authenticity.

We also used a process called Video2Video as a way to drive Ai with intention. Essentially we created a blueprint that show the Ai exactly the choices of our location, animation, framing etc. We then use a model trained on a style (in this case we used hand drawn style) to transform our blueprint into. Using this sketch style, we were able to connect a shoe designer’s blueprints to the world of skateboarding using a visual transition that embodied the concept of the entire piece. 

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