Case Study
Diadem | Court Flo Shoes
Animated Product Launch Video
Comfort Meets Performance
Diadem's new Court Flo shoe is designed for versatility. It is a pickleball-focused shoe that is also comfortable and stylish off-court. Diadem wanted to focus on both how the shoe is lightweight and airy, while also being super comfortable. Maybe it was very on-the-nose but we figured having it float up with comfy pillow-like objects around it would accomplish these goals.
MOODBOARD
The tone of the video needed to be modern, comfy and light so I used Pinterest to find some good shoe references that had that GOBO style lighting in a simple environment. We were definitely inspired by the abstract shapes used in some of the stuff we found.
STORYBOARDS
The concept for the video was pretty simple, we wanted to "turn gravity off" have the shoe float up, a few macro shots to call out the features, then softly float back to the ground. For each of their videos, I wanted to have a logo animation that matched the vibe. For this one, I wanted the tripple diamond mark to start off with soft edges resembling a thread gracefully weaving in the air, then conform to the hard edge diamond shape. Also representing the on-the-court and off-the-court functionality of the shoe.
Animatic
Here is the wireframe animatic. Sharing this with the client helps dial in the specific animation before we waste time or money rendering.
STYLE FRAMES
Diadem did not have CAD models for the shoe, only a prototype, which was fine. I used photogrammetry to capture over 300 unique angles of the shoe. We then feed those images into our photogrammetry software and create a precise point cloud of the shoe from which we can spit out a super hi-poly mesh with an accurate base color map. There are some more tricks we do to eventually end up with a hyper-realistic model of the shoe we can use for the video.
