How "Winning Formula" Was Made

In my all out quest to become the authority on Gatorade's new commercial, I asked the people at Gatorade and its ad firm Element 79 to give my blog readers a behind-the-scenes look at how the commercial was made. Tonight, they supplied me with Nicky Furno, a senior producer from Element 79. Nicky originally hails from Capetown, South Africa, and didn't know a lick about any of the sports featured in this ad. But she's an expert in post production and thanks to the intense work on this piece she now says she understands basketball, baseball and football. Enjoy our conversation.

Me: Nicky, thanks for joining me and congratulations on all the buzz this commercial has been getting. What was the reason for doing it?

Nicky: Well, we began conceptualizing about three months ago and we wanted our commercial to say that we have the science behind our product that others don't. So the main part of the copy was, "If you're a fraction off, it can change everything." And we felt the natural thing to do was to take moments in sports and see what happens if you miss the shot, the tag or the catch.

Me: Was this in response to POWERade's very successful ads where Coca-Cola wanted people to consider if things that were filmed (LeBron's full court shots and Michael Vick's toss that went hundreds of yards) were real or not?

Nicky: No. We were doing our own thing. We didn't really pay attention to their advertising per se.

Me: What were the moments that you considered?

Nicky: Well, there were many moments that we could have done. But it was important for us to get Michael and Derek in there because they are active Gatorade endorsers and they had those moments that basketball and baseball fans remember. We included the Montana-Clark moment so that we would span different time periods. We considered the Doug Flutie pass and the Christina Laettner shot, but we didn't want to have too much of a setup. We wanted these moments to be highly recognizable in a short amount of time.

Me: So how did you actually do all this? Was it just clicking around the mouse on the computer?

Nicky: No. It took place on a sound stage in California. We built an extremely large platforms and each one represented the area of play. Through research we figured out where the camera angles from the original footage were coming from and we spoke to broadcasters to figure out where they normally positioned their cameras. We also had to know the film that they used so that the speed would be right. The Montana-Clark moment was filmed in 35mm and the other two were filmed with Betacam SP.

Me: So I assume you then brought in the body doubles.

Nicky: Yes. We managed to find a fantastic guy in Los Angeles who had the frame of Jordan and moved in the same manner. He didn't look like him, but we did a face replacement in the end. The guy we got for Craig Ehlo actually resembled him. So we got the Jordan double to shoot the ball in a different manner so that we could change the trajectory of the shot and then, through motion control, we had the camera mimic the exact movement of the original shot.

Me: Did you then just splice in the crowd?

Nicky: No. We actually brought in a crowd to respond in a different way. Because in the actually highlight, the shot goes in and the crowd is bummed. We replaced them with what we filmed -- people celebrating.

Me: What about the play-by-play? How did you get Bulls announcer Johnny Kerr to say, "No good. Michael misses. Cleveland wins!"

Nicky: We wanted to be as authentic as possible with this. So we just commissioned him to say the line as he would have if Michael really missed. We did the same thing with Bobby Mercer on the Derek Jeter-Jorge Posada play and we got Harry Calas, who wasn't the original voice of "The Catch" to voice that.

Me: But were the original calls the real calls?

Nicky: No. Because of legal reasons, they were all re-voiced.

Me: Did you have to get approval from Jordan? Because I'm sure he wasn't happy that you made him miss the shot.

Nicky: Of course Michael and his people approved it. He's still under contract with us.

Me: I said in an earlier entry that there was no way you thought about the fact that the Montana-Clark moment was on third down. Did you miss that?

Nicky: Nope. We had a long discussion over it actually. But the bottom line was we wanted Everson Walls to have an alternate reaction because the pass wasn't completed. I don't agree that he wouldn't celebrate in some fashion.

Me: Craig Ehlo always joked that he never made any royalties on Gatorade showing the actual shot going in. Did he get any money on this ad?

Nicky: He actually did. We paid him a small fee through the NBA Players Association. It's not a residual or royalty, but he did make some money off of it.

Me: What was the hardest part of doing this?

Nicky: Everything. People don't realize how much work went into this. We had to recreate the uniforms to put on our body doubles. We had to bring in a new Jordan, a new ehlo, a new Dwight Clark, a new Everson Walls, a new referee, a new ump and we had to make sure the crowd was in appropriate period clothes. Then we had to match the lighting. An overcast day for the football game, the interior of the basketball arena and lighting that would match the baseball game. The detail is endless.

Me: Well, congratulations on a job well done. How do you feel about the success of it all?

Nicky: It feels awesome. It was six weeks of hell on earth. I didn't know how the hell we would do it. But now it's huge.

Me: I'd be dumb if I didn't ask this one. Should we expect more of these altering moments?

Nicky: (Silence).

Me: Well, I guess that means stay tuned!

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