shots chats to 180/RIOT's director-creatives Lee & Dan about racing to create their new campaign for adidas

When it comes to the stars of track and field, it's easy to get overawed by their godlike abilities. And, generally speaking, athletics advertising doesn't do much to help, portraying the record-breakers as super-human deities or sports machines. But a new campaign out of adidas' digital agency RIOT (180\TBWA\Critical Mass) is going beyond the stereotypes to shine a light on the humanity of the world's fastest people.

The campaign, Super 7, takes seven of adidas' most prominent track and field stars and takes an alternative look at their athletic prowess. Sprinter Tyson Gay is shown inflating a balloon with two breaths - demonstrating the fact that he runs the 100m sprint in just two puffs. Meanwhile runner - and secret bowling fan - Veronica Campbell-Brown races a bowling ball and beats it to the pins. One of the most epic spots sees long distance runner Haile Gebrselassie race sprinter Tyson Gay, to demonstrate that when Heilie won gold in the 10,000m at the Sydney Olympics in 2000, his time for the last 200m was very close to Gay's speed.

Creatives Lee Ford and Daniel Brooks came up with the idea when it transpired that the seven athletes would be available together in LA for a PR shoot. With only the loosest of briefs they came up with the idea of introducing the sportsmen and women using bizarre but playful trivia.

But that's not where it ends for Ford and Brooks. The pair, who direct under the title Lee & Dan, headed out to LA to shoot the eight films in a gruelling two days. They had a short time frame with each athlete - sometimes as little as an hour. And when they rocked up on set, the athletes had no idea what was in store for them

"We thought they would know what we were going to do with them before we got there. They didn't, so there was this nice element of surprise," says Brooks.

For Ford and Brooks, this turned out to be a happy accident, as they reckon it helped the athletes' spontaneity shine through in the spots.

"You can tell they're having a laugh, whereas usually they're quite serious, like machines.
That was a conscious decision on our part, we wanted to show them as humans," explains Ford. "They are so beyond what any normal person could do that you don't really see that human side of them. But the flip side is that they're just like you and me. Most of the spots you will see them laughing and smiling."

But while the spots had a light-hearted tone, the pair had to achieve a delicate balance. They were not quite ready to drag the stars down from Mount Olympus. "There's a continuous theme in all the spots, with a portrait of the athlete in a heroic pose in each spot," says Brooks. "Although we have a bit of fun with them, we still wanted to keep the tone that they are world class athletes."

Ford and Brooks have been directing together for five or six years now. And it was the fact that they would be allowed to shoot their own ideas that appealed to them about working at the 180 Amsterdam-based RIOT.

"For us it's really nice. We're in control from the start, never deferring to someone else's vision. That's what I didn't like when I was a creative, handing over your idea to someone else," says Ford.

But according to Brooks, they're not averse to working with other directors when appropriate. "On the flip side maybe there are ideas where a director would execute it in a different way," he muses.

Both think that the phenomenon of director-creatives is one that is likely to spread. It cuts down the layers in the production process, slashes turn around time, and that means that the client can communicate more closely with the director. "The whole process is being streamlined. I think that's a good thing given where the world is going," says Brooks.

And the pared-down process certainly helped the duo when cramming in eight spots into two days (seven athletes plus an intro).

For more information on the campaign, check out www.adidas.tv or www.adidas.com/running