Morphing Blake Griffin down to size

Credit: David & GoliathIs that the real Blake Griffin? It's a trick question -- andmovie magic.Time travel, while inordinately cool, presents its share of inconveniences for those incharge of the logistics. It’s one thing to write clever copy and enlist a charismatic starathlete for an ad campaign, but it takes finesse to draw in an audience. A smart premisehad been developed for Blake Griffin and automaker KIA, but getting it from the story-boards to your living room required some serious work. For Blake Griffin and the cre-ative team charged with transporting the power forward back to his childhood in Grif-fin’s KIA spots, that meant finding mini-Blakes who bore a resemblance to the present-day star.

“[Griffin] has a lot of old family photos,” said Colin Jeffery, executive creative directorat David & Goliath, the ad firm behind the KIA campaign. “And as we got into it, hewas great and his family was great supplying us with more images of what he lookedlike through the ages.”

Once the creative team got a sense of who Griffin was as a kid, it went to work trying tofind actors for the 1995, 1997 and 1999 spots. Creative directors, casting agents and visu-al effects mavens can be obsessive about authenticity, and they took it as a professionalimperative to ensure that viewers could buy that the young Blakes were earlier incarna-tions of the guy who leaps into the "SportsCenter" Top 10 a couple of times a week.

“We tried to find a nice balance of similarity to what he looks like today, but also try tostay fairly true to what he looked like at that time period,” Jeffery said. “That just madethe challenge even harder.”

David & Goliath started where just about everyone who shoots commercials starts -- en-listing a Los Angeles-based casting agency. Casting reels were collected from young ac-tors in Southern California, then a few of those kids were brought in for auditions. Theteam found their “baby Blake” for the first ad ("Free Throws"), but despite a glut of childactors in the Los Angeles area, it still hadn’t discovered their perfect Blake for the 1997("Football") and 1999 ("Arcade") ads.

“After about a week, we had nothing that was bang-on,” Jeffery said. “We opened upcasting on the East Coast, working with casting agents in New York. Beyond that, weknew there’d be a big challenge, so we actually opened it up online as well. We sent outa casting call via Facebook, Craigslist and Twitter.”

The clock was ticking. The agency knew it had to shoot in three weeks, but the team stilldidn’t have its mini-Blake. So everyone got into the act -- the ad firm, Griffin’s camp, theproduction company, the Los Angeles and New York casting agencies -- and used theirvarious social feeds as siren calls for a young Blake. Finally, a video reel found its wayinto Jeffery’s inbox.

“When that casting tape arrived from New York -- it was in Quicktime,” Jeffery said.“The minute I opened it up on my machine, there was this huge celebration in the of-fice.”

Justin Fosque, a 10-year-old from the New York area, was the cause of celebration. Youknow him as the kid in the jean shorts in 1997, and playing the wrong video game in1999.

“We couldn’t have gotten closer if we tried,” Jeffery said. “We were all excited that we’dspent the extra funds and extra time because it was amazing, really. When you put themside by side at that age, and even now, it’s like a spitting image.”

Griffin’s comic timing and the general conceit of the campaign make the series work,

and it’s not as if Griffin would’ve been less amusing had the kids looked marginally lesslike him, but the casting really shines, and Fosque, in particular, lends the spots a real-ness we don’t see a lot in 30-second snippets.

A few days before the shoot during a wardrobe fitting at Griffin’s house, Jeffery pulledup Fosque’s Quicktime reel.

“I just sat back and watched [Griffin’s] face as the video started, and he just laughed outloud straight away,” Jeffery said. “It was funny. I had a still shot of [Fosque] as well. Iput a still of [Griffin] next to the kid, holding them both up, and Blake was just laughinghis head off.”

Headed into casting, Jeffery confessed that he had little faith in the process. He assumedthey’d have to use a bunch of visual effects on an actor with a lesser resemblance, or justhave to scale down present-day Griffin. Then they stumbled upon Fosque.

“It was crazy,” Griffin said. “It was actually kind of weird because as a kid, I don’t feellike that’s how I looked, but he looks so much like me now, or what people would thinkI looked like, it was pretty scary. They did an amazing job with all those kids. They real-ly went all out.”

The most recent two ads that feature adolescent Blakes -- “Sunblock” and “BenchPress,” which take place in 2002 and 2006, respectively -- were easier in some respects,but more difficult in others. The creative team didn’t have to perform a nationwidesearch for miniature lookalikes, because Griffin would play himself in the spots. Butmorphing the present-day 23-year-old Griffin into the 13-year-old and 17-year-oldGriffins demanded some sophisticated technology.

Method Studios, a global visual effects group whose credits include “Captain America:The First Avenger,” “Cloud Atlas,” “Men in Black 3” and “The Girl with the DragonTattoo,” was brought on to the project. Creative director/VFX supervisor BenjaminWalsh oversaw the process.

So far as visual effects, the “Sunblock” spot presented a challenge -- how do you get a13-year-old Griffin to look like the life-size version?

Walsh and director Paul Hunter decided that “Sunblock” would need a full Franken-stein job. So the 13-year-old Blake whose cupped hands are being doused with lotion is23-year-old Blake's head superimposed on a teenage actor's frame. This wasn’t easy.First, the shoot required nearly identical takes from the teenage body double and Grif-fin. Griffin was taller than his younger counterpart so, for instance, he had to slouchwhile sitting against the basketball goal to get the shot right.

“We got the body double to act out the exact lines and action Blake was meant to do inthe script,” Walsh said. “Then we’d get Blake to do the same lines and actions in thesame position. We tried to make sure Blake’s head lined up where the kid’s head was.”

Shooting “Bench Press” was simpler because one look at a photo of Griffin at 17 con-vinced the creative team that it didn’t need to bring in a body double.

“When you look at photos of [Griffin] when he was 17, he was already like a man,”Walsh said. “He was already similar height. He had developed muscles. That was a lotdifferent than when he was 13.”

For Walsh and the visual effects whizzes, the real work began after the shoots. They’dhave to “de-age” Griffin to make his 23-year-old face look like his teenage self. Method’steam studied the old photographs down to the finest detail, then got down to the metic-ulous work of molding him into his younger self.

“We noticed when Blake was 13, he had a lot more little freckles around his nose and ontop of the cheeks, so we added that as an extra detail. We puffed out the cheeks a tinybit because instead of the big square jaw he has now, he had a little baby fatty cheekswhen he was 13.”

They brought Griffin’s eyes a little closer together, did some work on his nose, gave hima haircut, removed bags under his eyes, smoothed out his skin and played with his com-plexion. And they didn’t stop with Griffin’s facial features. The teenage actor in “Sun-block” was a little muscular for a 13-year-old, so they used effects to slim down his bodycomposition.

The details of the metamorphosis sound almost absurd. The vast majority of the public -

- pretty much anyone who didn’t know Griffin at age 13 -- would never pick up onthese subtleties. But for Walsh and the creative team, this was vital because the spotshad to cross a threshold of plausibility with regard to the younger Griffin. We’re alreadysuspending disbelief when we travel 10 years into the past, but once we get there, wehave to be able to buy the scene.

“It was a big challenge,” Walsh said. “[David & Goliath] wanted a hint of the modern-day Blake in there, wanted people to see straight away that it was Blake without regis-tering. But we also had to find those details and examine the differences between 23-year-old Blake and the younger Blakes to actually make this successful. Because if youdid just put the 23-year-old Blake’s head on the smaller body, it really looks freaky.”

As they did with the 13-year-old Blake, the visual effects crew took the image of Griffinlying on the bench, then used techniques to make him skinnier.

“We carved away at his back, carved away at his arms, carved away at his calves,” Jef-fery said. “We basically took away muscle and mass to make him look late-teens.”

As much as Jeffery marveled at the work done by Method Studios and as much fun asWalsh had walking through the intricate process of reshaping Griffin, there’s a collec-tive sense among those who work with Griffin that he’s the best special effect on theKIA campaign.

“I’ve worked on the creative side with tons of athletes,” Jeffery said. “Nobody comesclose to him in terms of being comfortable and confident in front of the camera.”

When David & Goliath landed the account and got a feel for Griffin’s on-camera per-sona, they began to write scripts tailored to his sensibility. Griffin is more deadpan thanbrooding, more self-deprecating than self-aggrandizing (so long as he’s not dunking onyou during a live game).

“He has this postmodern quality to him,” Jeffery said. “Like he has deadpan down, thecomedic timing, this Wes Anderson-type quality, so we purposely write scripts and dia-logue to that.”

Griffin won’t take the bait when asked, but the levity of the KIA campaign has elevatedan image that, after his rookie season, was a little bit self-serious. Between the lines,Griffin was a spitfire, even though those who interacted with him off the court knewhim to be ironic and light-hearted.

“When people take themselves too seriously, they get away from who they really are,”Griffin said. “I don’t want to be the guy who says, ‘This commercial has to be all this.’ Idon’t mind making fun of myself. And I don’t mind making fun of other commercials.They’re so serious.”