The Character Shop: Giant Shoes for Adidas

If it's a set of Big Shoes you want, TCS can fill 'em!

Let's say you want to create a pair of limited edition, artist series sneakers. Because custom kicks are the bomb, yo. But you want these to be *really* limited edition. And you want one set of artists, from the West Coast to decorate the Left shoe, and another set of artists, from the opposite coast, to decorate the Right. And you want those suckers to be 5 feet tall and 15 feet long. Did you say five FEET tall and FIFTEEN FEET LONG? Who you gonna call?
The Character Shop, that's who, my brother.

Adidas Originals and Ad Agency 180 LA dreamed up this crazy scenario, hired Radical Media to film the web campaign, and relied on Rick Lazzarini and the Character Shop to create an enormous canvas (well, two canvasses, really), only in the shape of two giant Adidas shoes. Well, gigundinormous, really. The TCS team first began by studying and photographing a pair of Adidas Superstar sneaks, and then determining how to scale them up to be the size of an SUV. EACH.

3d Previsualization sofware gave Lazzarini and crew an accurate estimate of just how much material was needed. Rather than an expensive sculpt-mold-cast process, TCS went for a direct construction progress. That is, rather than create a sculpture, making a mold of that, destroying the sculpture, and producing castings from the mold, the original forms were first rough/carved out of styrofoam, had urethane foam blocks and pours added and sculpted, and then coated with an epoxy/fiberglass coating, so it could withstand people climbing on top of it. It was all topped off with a flat white house paint, chosen for its longevity, faithfulness to the original virgin white shoes, and the ability to serve as the perfect canvas for the Artist Teams to jump in and decorate.

But details abound. Few people stop and study what really makes a Superstar click. TCS' artists and technicians used digital microscopes to discover how big to make those toe-shell X shapes, and how to to distribute that pattern faithfully. The stitching, the logos, the side triple stripes with the pinking-sheared edges, the texture of the soles, everything was duplicated in painstaking detail and exact scale, right on up to the shoelaces...you know, those hollow cords of fabric? With the coarse weave texture? Yeah. They used firehose. Awesome.

In the end, the shoe forms were hollowed out, and heavy-duty wheels attached, to allow them to coast, spin, and travel. Reknowned artists Sam Flores and Upper Playground represented the Left Coast and Shoe, while the NYC-based Surface2Air collective made the Right shoe their baby. Check out the pics and flix of our crazy kicks!

Double-click to start/stop the movies:

Giant Adidas Shoe Progress Page (as created for Client): TCS Giant Adidas Shoes progress

Explore more links to pages about the Adidas "Left/RIght" Project: Adidas Left/Right Project

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