SKETCHERS - Kudus Viral Video

UGC, User Generated Content, has become the new norm across social platforms in advertising. Fewer athletes and artists are on film sets, with less need for large crews capturing every facet of the brand. Instead, we are seeing sponsored individuals or groups producing content themselves on mobiles, or at least that is the narrative. As brands adapt their marketing, we are seeing more seemingly improbable content, with celebrities subtly supporting branded merch in what looks like casual phone footage, leaving audiences guessing whether what they have seen is real or not, when in fact much more is going on behind the scenes.

The strategy works. Audiences share the clips with friends, debate their legitimacy, and generate a surge of views, which in turn means more eyes on the brand.

This is a long-winded way of saying we have jumped on board to produce some unusual content for Sketchers and their new brand ambassador, Mohammed Kudus, and the response has been gold. It has sparked media coverage and conversations across the internet debating its authenticity. But they can rest easy, we are here to do some debunking.

Making a bath 

As much as Sketchers might like you to believe, Kudus did not actually bathe in a public car park, not on a media day with multiple teams queuing up for shoot time. The film team did, remarkably, get him into a bathtub against a green screen, dousing him with foam from a machine while he kicked up the occasional clump of bubbles. This was paired with a drizzly guerilla shoot in a local car park, complete with planted extras gawking at a piece of cardboard standing in for the bath. Team Grizzle’s job was to piece this all together, compositing bathtub-Kudus into the urban car park with countless touches to make it feel genuine.

It’s Real… Sort of

It is not actually AI, although we are flattered by the assumption. A surprising debate seems to have surfaced as to whether this was made by artists or not, with many insisting generative AI must have produced the work. Whilst AI can and does create some startlingly realistic content, we are taking this as a compliment. It is a powerful tool, but in this instance it was all the Grizzle team enjoying some VFX compositing in Adobe After Effects. Kudus might never have left the training grounds, but he did jump in a bath and get covered in bubbles.

Keying and Rotoscoping

Not usually the most glamorous part of VFX editing, but definitely one of the most time-consuming. Keying in After Effects is rarely a one-click solution; it leaves artefacts that need cleanup and can desaturate colours, but it does cover large areas quickly. Rotoscoping, on the other hand, gives much more precision but takes significantly longer.

Now, throw in soft, partially transparent foamy edges with reflections, and you have a slippery problem. By combining methods we were able to strip out most of the background without destroying too many bubbles. This became more effective by layering in sections of bubbles with varying degrees of keying and colour correction until the foamy structures looked natural, soft edged, transparent, and believable.

Shadows and Lighting

Getting shadows and lighting right is the cornerstone of any convincing VFX shot. If they do not match the scene, the illusion falls apart. But how do you cast a shadow from an object that is not there? You build one.

We hopped into C4D, modelled the bath using online references, and aligned it with the footage. The invisible 3D bath cast shadows along a transparent floor plane, acting as a shadow catcher.

The next challenge was reproducing the sunlight. It had been an overcast day, so the light was diffused, and we had no data on the exact location or time of day. However, by analysing the existing shadows in the scene, we worked out that the sun must have been more or less directly overhead, around midday, which allowed us to place our primary light source. Alongside this we added tracked headlights from a passing car, giving us a tidy reproduction of the conditions on the day, which we then rendered and brought back into the AE composition.

Nuance

With the scene close to finished, we added a few extra flourishes to sell the illusion: soap suds on the tarmac, reflections, additional shadows, heat distortion, and even digitally cutting him in half.

It turned out that while we had perfect footage of Kudus’s upper body, his feet crossed in such a way that the Sketchers branding was not clear. The fix was simple, dig through the takes until we found a clean boot shot, mask out the original feet, and tuck them neatly behind a layer of bubbles.