2001 Nike Tag Commercial Is "It"

One of the greatest television commercials ever is the Nike “Tag” commercial. In the TV ad, a young man is walking along in a large city with his newspaper and coffee and is “tagged” from behind. Since he is now “it”, he is required to chase all the people around him, who are now fleeing to get away from him, so that he can tag someone else to be “it”. Humor ensues as he finds it difficult to chase and make contact with any of the ordinary city dwellers who have now stopped their normal routines and become intensely active in this massive citywide game.

The Nike “Tag” commercial was one of four TV adverts in a summer 2001 Nike campaign that had the theme of “Play”. The other three commercials in the campaign were “Shaderunner”, “Racing”, and “Tailgating”. The Tag ad premiered on American television on June 25th, 2001, and ran until Labor Day, September 3rd, 2001. It had the unusual length of 90 seconds for its initial version, which ran on television for a week. After that, a 60 second and 30 second version were used instead.

The Tag commercial, from the advertising agency Wieden+Kennedy (W+K), was a huge success in the advertising world, winning the Grand Prix at the 2002 Cannes International Advertising Festival. It was one of the ten most-awarded commercials of 2002, and in 2010 was voted one of the top ten advertisements of the decade by Campaign magazine.

Three of the Nike “Play” commercials, Shaderunner, Racing, and Tag were filmed together in Toronto, Canada. Location scouts spent a month looking for the right spots to film in Toronto, but because of bad weather during the filming period, changes in the scripts, locations, and schedule had to be made. It was decided to film all three commercials simultaneously in a compressed 10 day period, shooting scenes whenever a location was available and the weather was cooperating.

“Shaderunner” required real shade being cast by the city buildings onto where the runner was running, and so the filming of the other two commercials had to work around the availability of sun and shade as the film crew had to move quickly to use it whenever they had it. The filming of Tag then ended up having a lot of “winging it” to get it done in the time available. That flexibility allowed such important ideas like the trashcan hiders to be added while filming was going on.

The film crew used 16mm film and three cameras to shoot each scene. The goal was to do each scene in one take, and the three cameras would allow for different views of the action to be put together. With the short schedule and 400 to 500 extras taking part, it was important to minimize the retakes.

The success and the lasting appeal of the commercial can be attributed in part to the sympathetic protagonist of the piece and the actor who played him. Who is the guy in the Nike Tag commercial, the one who is “it”? It is actor Moti Yona, also known as Moti Yona Rosen, or Moti Rosen. He is a Canadian actor, who among other things appeared as Charley in the 2003 move Twist. Tag was Moti’s first commercial. The story is that he was selected right before filming from the hundreds of extras who answered the call to show up and be part of the commercial. Moti was amazed to be the lead, and with the many extras around him during his first scene (the crane shot showing his realization and exasperation that he had been tagged), it felt to him like being in a feature film.

The commercial was shot in several locations in Toronto, which was evident by the reflection of the CN tower on the glass side of an office building in one of the shots. The initial scene of Moti being tagged was at the intersection of York and Wellington, next to the Canadian Pacific Tower. The famous scene of the line of people hiding behind the trashcan was at Emily and King Streets. An interesting production note is that when the mob of people are running north on Emily to King Street, the film is reversed. When Moti gets to the intersection and looks around, the film is the correct orientation again.

After Moti realizes that people are hiding behind the trashcan and starts to chase them, people run down the stairs into the St. Andrew subway station. When they get to the bottom, they are however at Toronto’s abandoned Lower Bay station, which was only used as an actual subway station for six months after it opened in 1966. It was closed and unused thereafter, but it found a second career as a filming location for many movies, television and commercials.

The music for the Nike Tag commercial was an original piece written by David Wittman, a composer at the music production company Elias Associates. The advertising agency had asked him to create something that didn’t sound like a typical TV advert score, and he was happy to comply. The techno track he composed included drums, a cello baseline, a bongo solo throughout, and some simple techno-type elements. Wittman wanted a fun sound that fit the intriguing and unusual storyline.

The shoes on Moti Yona are the black/grey Nike Air Fantaposite Max. The strangest aspect of the commercial is that everyone, including businessmen in dress shoes, is all able to outrun the guy wearing these Nike shoes. That’s not necessarily a good testament for the shoes’ capabilities.
 

Thousands of Sky Lanterns Light the Night

Eleven thousand sky lanterns were released into the night sky on June 21, 2011, in Poznan, Poland, to celebrate Midsummer Night. The event was promoted on Facebook as "Poznan's most romantic night". People were invited to come and buy paper lanterns (for about $1.80) and release them into the sky after lighting their fuel and letting the hot air take them up and away.

The event was scheduled to start at 10:30 pm and around 1000 of these Chinese lanterns were released all at once. Within an hour an additional 10,000 were gradually released, creating an impressive image of thousands of lights in the Polish sky.

The number of sky lanterns released at one time was a record for Poland, which was a goal of the event's organizers. It may also be a Guiness World Record, as 11,000 floating lanterns flown simultaneously would beat the previous record of 10,318 lanterns held by Indonesia.

The Midsummer Night occurs on the shortest night of the year, on June 21st or 22nd. It is near to the time of "Ivan Kupala" (or Noc Kupały), a feast day for St. John the Baptist, which is also a reason for the celebration.



Sky lanterns are traditional paper lanterns used in parts of Asia. They are usually made from oiled rice paper on a bamboo frame, which can easily burn up, but there are also now flame-retardant sky lanterns available made from bio-degradable material. The lanterns float in the air due to a small candle or fuel source secured to the frame creating hot air that lifts the lantern.

Of course there is a downside to having thousands of little fires floating to who knows where, carrying its own paper trash. Beside distributing litter, they can cause crop fires and injure or kill livestock that eat the wire frames.

The large display of sky lanterns is reminiscent of the beautiful floating lanterns seen in the Disney movie Tangled, during the "I See the Light" song.

Japanese Men’s Rhythmic Gymnastics

The Japanese really excel at men’s rhythmic gymnastics and this video shows it. The video shows the performance of the team from Aomori University at the 2009 All Japan Rhythmic Gymnastics Championship. With this wonderful routine, Aomori received 1st place on the university level at the championship.

The routine is a great example of synchronization and precision, but it is also enormously artistic. It’s filled with tumbling, but it seems more like an emotive dance routine than just a display of athleticism.

Men’s rhythmic gymnastics in Japan has both individual and group competition. The individual routines use apparatuses (sticks, rings, rope, clubs) while the group routine does not. The group routine is free exercise done by a six member team on a spring floor.

Aomori University is a private school located in Aomori, Japan, which on the north end of the main island of Japan (Honshu).

Besides the physical performance of the athletes, an essential part of the overall beauty of the routine is the music that accompanies it. The song is “Blue”, by the five woman group D.F.O. (Digital Future Orchestra), from their album “Runner”. That group later became a duo, retaining the initials D.F.O., but changing it to stand for Double Female Orchestra.

The song and album are not available in the U.S., but can be downloaded from iTunes Japan (if you have an account on iTunes Japan). The song was also used in a commercial for Japan Airlines.

Same performance, but different view and in high definition:

How To Make A Great Lip Dub Video

A good behind-the-scenes look at making a lip dub

What is a lip dub? A lipdub is a type of music video. In the video people lip-sync to music, and later the original version of the music is dubbed in, replacing any audio that was recorded during the making of the video.

That’s the simple definition. However there are certain important elements that are commonly used in the videos described as lip dubs, and a lot of these elements are what make a great lip dub video versus a common piece of YouTube crap.

The thing that these elements have in common is that they are intended to make the video visually interesting. People aren’t watching lip dubs to hear the music or see how well people can lip-sync; viewers want to see something that will stimulate their visual cortex.

So if you are ready to make a lip dub, let’s look at the key elements for doing it right. The most important element is the music. It needs to be a song that people are going to like, preferably something fun and upbeat. It doesn’t matter how good the video part of your video is if the music is no good. People will stop watching it and move on to something else if they don’t like the song, or if the music isn’t exciting enough to keep their attention.

Once you have selected your song, you need to deal with the legalities, assuming you want to make your lipdub available to the public. You need to get a synchronization license and master use license from the publisher and record company. If you don't get permission to use the song, the music company can have the video taken down from any website or have the audio removed. Then you'd only have a silent video of people strangely moving around. 

Concerning the video part, it should be mentioned that you should make sure you can get a couple hundred of your friends to be in it. You can make a good lip dub with a much smaller number, but you’ll see why that’s hard to do as we consider the most important aspects of the visual components.

The first important visual aspect is the near universal convention that lip dubs be done with one continuous shot. It adds a “wow” factor that would be a lot less if the video were a typically edited product that allowed parts to be added in or redone using multiple takes. Some great lipdubs do cheat a little by disguising their cuts, but they do try to make it look like it could have been a continuous shot. 

The second important aspect of the visuals is that lip dub videos move, literally, and at a good clip. They are the opposite of home videos where the camera stays still and focuses on one thing for a torturous length of time. In a lip dub the camera is moving most of the time, going through the scenery. For that reason, a Steadicam is essential. It keeps the picture from bouncing around with the moving cameraman. You can rent a Steadicam, and while you're at it, you might as well hire a professional cameraman to operate it to create a better product.

Because the videos move and are timed to a specific song, it's essential to establish "marks" along the path you are going to travel through your location. You need to determine where the camera needs to be at certain points in the song so you can ties the visuals to the lyrics and so the cast knows which segment of the song they'll be performing at their spot.

The third important aspect of the visuals is that lipdubs are all about the variety in the performance, the appearance of the people moving around and lip-syncing before the camera, and the locations the camera passes through. It’s a showcase of how many varied visual elements you can cram into a song-length video.

You can probably see now that if the video is one continuous shot, with the camera moving fast and the focus of the shot on the variety of the participants and the locations, you need a lot of people involved. If you had a small number of people it would require a lot of quick changes by the cast in appearance and props and a lot of running to the next location to be ready for their next on-camera moment.

To create the variety, here is a list of elements that are commonly used within the lip dup videos:

1) In general the camera moves at a good clip, but the speed should vary when moving from one “scene” to the next.

2) When moving the camera, don’t only move forward, in one direction. A good lip dub turns directions constantly, moves forward, backward and sideways, turning corners, entering rooms, moving up and down stairs. It also points in directions other than only straight ahead.

3) The cast should wear a variety of clothes/costumes, use lots of different props, and perform a lot of different actions.

4) The cast needs to look like they are having a good time. The video is supposed to be fun, not work.

5) The camera moves past some people and moves with others, following them and sometimes chasing them.

6) The camera and the cast is always leading to the next thing to be shown, drawing the camera and the viewer along to see the next “reveal”. A common way to do a reveal is opening doors, exposing the next scene and set of performers.

7) When people lead the camera from one scene to another, the people on the next scene should already be on the move as the previous one slow or go off camera. Think of it like passing a baton in a relay, where both racers are moving at the same time.

8) The video is about the people, so don’t leave gaps where there is far more scenery than cast. It’s important to keep the camera close enough to fill much of the viewing area.

9) Some miscellaneous elements that are commonly used: people throwing stuff, the camera going between a double line of people, the camera moving directly through a line of people as they divide and go to the left and right, and a group of people moving with all stopping except one who moves forward to transition to the next location.

10) There should be at least one massive crowd scene. It adds another “wow” for the immenseness of the undertaking.

11) Don’t forget Waldo!

Here is a link to my playlist of the best lip dubs on YouTube.

All of the best lip dub videos are in this player: