#8 Creativity's Most Viewed--Nike, Leave Nothing: A-

This spot is pretty great. Some of the transitions bother me a little, but the idea of fluidly following these guys as they run through 16 weeks of a grueling season is nice. The music from Last of the Mohicans isn't what you'd expect and really enhances the feel of the commercial. I will say that at first, I hated "Leave Nothing" as a tag. Don't you want to leave it all on the field? As in "Leave Everything"? But now I've seen it enough I guess my brain has found some sort of backwards logic. If you "Leave Nothing", that means you've given everything you had?

I worked on the accompanying Nike website for this, so I was there when they were filming. To give you an idea of the difference between internet and tv resources, our set had a 10' x 10' green screen (assembled by us and our one grip) in the middle of a high school football field. The commercial was filmed at the Rose Bowl, over the course of 2-3 days, with 50' high, 80 yard long greenscreens. An immensely expensive spot directed by Michael Mann, hundreds of people on set and tons of extras.

Here's about the only decent thing we could put together from our digital shoot:



If I had to grade the work we did for this campaign, I'd give it a D+ (aside from some great design work). That's about all I'm going to say about that, unless you talk to me after six beers, in which case I'll be much more vocal on the subject.

The good news, is I got to meet all those guys, including Megatron.