Sport Chek “Determination”

Here’s a spot I worked on earlier this year- A Sport Chek commercial starring NHL player Sidney Crosby.  The premise is very straightforward- many slow motion shots of Sidney training hard in the gym, with the speed ramping up and building in intensity, and abruptly ending with tagline and logo lockup.

I like working on athletic spots like this because I consider my figure drawing and figure invention abilities to be first-rate and it’s an opportunity to showcase those skills.  They usually need convincing facial expressions of “intensity” as well, which I think I render pretty well.  Here’s the boards.

[slideshow id=42]Note:  Sometimes when I upload these really long board sequences, the slideshow function on this website messes up and loads only a portion of boards, or loads them out of order.  If some of the images appear to be missing, or jumbled, just wait thirty seconds and hit reload on your browser- you may have to do this twice.  Eventually all the images will be cached to your browser and it should play smoothly.

Here’s the final product:

http://youtu.be/fL5opL-yxRk

Another fun part of this project was working onsite at the lovely Casa Del Mar in Santa Monica, right on the beach.  It’s a really nice hotel and although it’s never easy to work under unorthodox circumstances, the production staff were very kind to buy me lunch and have the work experience be as comfortable as possible.  Here’s some photos of the hotel.

Not bad!  Most commercial production staff are not based in hotels – but when they are not LA based (in this case, the production company was Canadian, which is certainly appropriate for NHL affiliated brand), they do tend to stay in the nicer hotel offerings in LA.  And sometimes, when they need storyboards, I get to hang out with them.