Director: Fredrik Bond
Agency: Wieden & Kennedy Amsterdam
Production: MJZ
Client: Nike

So after the huge success of Sony PlayStation “Mountain” we embarked on another crowd job which benefited from all our efforts and research, this, of course, needed to be extended, and I took it upon myself to finish what we did for Mountain by taking the social route to the very extreme, given that this was the perfect situation to use it.

From people very close together trying to go from A to B now we were faced with crowds that had to behave like real people by doing just more than standing, clapping hands, which took me to the question of what do we do when we do nothing other than watch a football match?

The answer is loads of things, so we set out to record in video a bunch of Brazilians, then a bunch of Portuguese, as the game was Brazil vs. Portugal, then a bunch of people that were not one nor the other, then mix them up in different ratios and observe the situations that appeared.

We then identified the core actions, the very particular things from people, the actual transfer of mood, the actual social quality in which you are taken once you are in the middle of a happy bunch or the middle of some sad people, then of course we used music to trigger true emotions and from all those we build a clear map of which thing we needed to model.

The main stages, the actions, the modifiers, accents, as I call them and many more things were taken into account, and the brains were able to work out the same group behaviours which resulted in extremely believable action.

To test it, I setup a extremely long simulation and made sure we watched it again and again to see if we could identify the same thing that we saw in the real people. To my surprise, and although simplified in many ways, the core actions were there.

From then on, every single stadium job has used these agents and built upon them, creating more clever brains, more variation and making sure they are even more directable. To make sure we can reuse them in a very fresh way.

The link has been copied!