BRANDING BY STORYTELLING.
Reebok wanted to create a series of films to inspire citizens of the world (customers and non-customers alike) to get out and be active through their campaign: "Live with Fire." The challenge became to find and tell inspiring yet relatable true-stories of athletes and artists. From these stories the goal was to build a subtle but powerful brand image of a company that 'believes in everyone, in every circumstance.'
We knew that many Reebok consumers aspired to their own personal athletic and creative goals, so "Live with Fire" was to be our kick-in-the butt, cheer-leading ode to them. It was designed to inspire and push Reebok's loyal customers and non-customers further towards their ambitions. In sending a subtle message of 'belief in the individual' we felt confident that we could generate a positive response to the brand, improve the brand's public perception, and have a meaningful affect on the community at large.
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CONCEPT DEVELOPMENT
CONCEPT TO COMPLETION IN 2 MONTHS.
XPonential's Sam Nozik and Matt Morganthaler knew that the sport featured in the film would be as important to creating a captivating spot as the central character would be. Monoskiing quickly emerged as a widely growing sport that had a high level of curiosity among members of the greater community. The Xponential Team began sifting through hundreds of true-stories and contacting monoskiing and paralympic training facilities throughout the western U.S. to arrange research trips to meet skiers and gain a better understand of the sport and its community.
Sam and Matt set off on what would eventually become a 3000-Mile series of research and production trips over the next 2-Months.
They met almost 100 adaptive athletes and discussed each of their stories in depth before finally meeting Eric Cavalli, the athlete who would become the subject of the film. "It wasn't a hard choice," says XPonential owner and creative director, Sam Nozik, "his story was so moving and yet so simple. He was paralyzed in a skiing accident and then the first thing he did after he got out of the hospital was learn to monoski. And he wasn't without fear, but his passion was more powerful."
THE MISSION: "LIVE WITH FIRE"
3,000 MILES.
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DIRECTOR SAMUEL NOZIK PRODUCER MATT MORGENTHALLER
CASE STUDY
"Once we had Eric, the story took on its own life" Sam recalls, "everything just fell into place. He had so much life and passion in what he was doing. I was so excited to be telling his story but I also felt this huge weight on my shoulder to really capture that and do justice to him, the brand and the message we were trying to create."
The commercial needed to be pre-planned to-a-tee. The challenge for the XPonential Team was the task of creating a commercial that was both authentic and highly emotional and yet entirely pre-scripted, despite being a true story. To do this, Sam and Matt spent hours listening to Eric tell his story, before sitting down to write the final narrative and structure of the spot.
PREPARATION
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EXECUTION AND FINAL SPOT
Production of the spot took place over six-days. "We only had a small amount of money to actually execute the entire 2-minute spot." Says Matt, "Given our limited resources, it was absolutely essential that we be very calculating in every decision we made and be prepared for every eventuality... of which there are many when you're at 11,000 feet on a remote snowy mountain."
"At XPonential we're always trying to figure out how to take something that is relatively low in budget and make it look and feel like million bucks," says Sam. "We had an incredible scenary and a great story, but we had to be very careful about only shooting what we knew we would use in the final spot. The math for us was that one great moment was always gonna be better than a few okay moments. It was a very self-disciplining process, we always had to come back to Reebok's central message of 'LIVE WITH FIRE'. This was about inspiring people to get out and be thier best, and that was what was in our heads every step of the way. I think we're all very proud of the way it turned out."
Check out the final spot here:
