Revolutionizing Basketball with the Wilson Airless Prototype

Wilson Sporting Goods, the supplier of the official basketball of the NBA, has always been committed to innovation and pushing the boundaries of what's possible in basketball equipment. In that spirit, they introduced the Wilson Airless Prototype - a groundbreaking new basketball that is set to revolutionize the game. 

The team at Wilson Basketball contacted us for our expertise to create an engaging, emotional, storytelling piece, centered around the Airless Prototype. The film was set out to spark worldwide buzz at the NBA All-Star 2023 by debuting the Wilson 3D printed basketball for the first time during the Dunk Contest, live on broadcast.

The team's expertise in creating visually stunning and technically complex projects enabled us to fully capture the complexity and beauty of the ball's manufacturing process. With the full trust and creative freedom granted to us by Wilson, we were able to leverage our skills and produce a film that accurately captures the essence of the Wilson Airless Prototype.

The film had to build suspense and tell an emotional story, while at the same time it had to focus on explaining the innovative technology used to create the basketball. The challenge lay in finding a way to combine the functional with the aspirational storytelling. Getting the balance right between the different scales in the film was a journey. It involved merging the scale of the super close-up shots featuring the dust and particles with the wider shots of the basketball and the raw printing materials.

A look into the development of the physical ball and our visual approach. There was a short timeframe to produce the film, 2 weeks from kick off to final delivery. We first took 2 days to storyboard, find style references, R&D and build style frames. Then we quickly moved into rough animation, after which we kept polishing shots and the edit all the way until the final delivery.