Los Angeles vfx and design company A52 was honored for the first time in the visual effects category by the AICP Show for last year's Nike Golf KID TIGER broadcast spot from Wieden+Kennedy.
The presentation of the 15th Annual AICP Show was held June 8 by the Assoc. of Independent Commercial Producers at New York's Museum of Modern Art.
Honoring the best commercials of the previous year, the AICP Show will now go on tour to museums and cultural institutions across the U.S. and abroad. Additional information on the Show, upcoming tour dates and venues is online at www.aicp.com.
A52's distinction this year is an important one for the 10-year-old company, as this is the ninth consecutive year its work has been honored in the AICP Show.
"Over the past 10 years, A52 has established a solid reputation for handling beautiful, seamless visual effects, for delivering gorgeous finished imagery and for creating animation that looks like live action," touted Mark Tobin, A52's managing director and exec producer. "As a result, the artists' collaborations with top creatives, directors, dps and editors have consistently been honored in the AICP's Visual Style, Cinematography, Graphics, Animation and Advertising Excellence categories, but this year, the jurors recognized the significance of our team's contributions to this extraordinary spot for Hal Curtis, his colleagues at W+K and Nike Golf. We're very proud of everyone involved from our side, including our co-vfx supervisors Tim Bird and Pat Murphy, both of whom added artistry to this spot that few people would ever imagine upon watching it."
In home-movie quality, the :60 KID TIGER spot shows a 5-year-old Tiger Woods playing the Old Course in St. Andrews, Scotland, during the British Open. He hits one remarkable shot after another in front of the jubilant crowd, and celebrates his performance with joyous demonstrations as his mother and father look on. At the end, we see the full-grown Tiger enjoying his win. During one week last July representing seven days of working around the clock, Bird, Murphy, producer April Killingsworth and other A52 artists artfully transformed 20-year-old VHS home movies of young Tiger, along with recent NTSC broadcast footage from the British Open and stills of the St. Andrews Clubhouse, stands of crowds and other live-action plates, to create the finished spot.
So far, KID TIGER has also earned a Silver International ANDY Award, as well as a Certificate of Merit in this year's One Show.
A52's team also included vfx artists Alicia Aguilera, Eric Algren, Justin Blaustein, Craig "Xray" Halperin, Scott Johnson, Ben Looram and Ryan Yoshimoto.
A52 also contributed to two other commercials that were honored in this year's AICP Show: Xbox 360 WATER BALLOONS and Nike FC USA, both of which are honored in the Show's Editorial category.
Established in 1997 as a home for the very latest high-end photoreal visual effects technologies and the industry's most innovative and talented graphic design artists, West Hollywood visual effects and design company A52 (www.A52.com) creates award-winning imagery for some of the most visually ambitious commercial and TV projects.
Bill Desowitz, former editor of VFXWorld, is currently the Crafts Editor of IndieWire.
