Water Made Active
In its new ‘Water Made Active’ ad for G Active, Gatorade pushes the boundaries by creating a stop-motion athlete using drops of water, precision-timed strobe photography and a liquid printer.
As if the result alone wasn’t impressive enough, the team has revealed that the commercial was made entirely in-camera. James Medcraft, the project’s director of photography explained, “We’re using the flash to freeze the water droplets at a very precise moment in space, and we’re having to do that with millimeter and microsecond accuracy.”
The liquid printer, which took 5,000 man-hours to build, comprises more than 20,000 parts and 2,048 individual nozzles. Each nozzle turned on and off within two milliseconds. The printer would drop frame-by-frame animations, which the strobes would freeze in mid-air via flash. To create the motion sequence, the team charted data from a real athlete who ran, jumped, and kicked while wearing sensors.
Directed by: Cole Paviour
Director of Photography: James Medcraft
Production Company: UNIT 9