Bristol-based illustrator/animator Con McHugh combines forces with Benjamin Chan and Malone Chen at digital design studio TwoMuch to add a little attitude to ON’s premium marathon running shoe, the Cloudboom Max.

Con McHugh: “Internally, ON had been playing with the shoe itself being this likeable, friendly character with sketched-on arms. The campaign would be led by a 60-second video where Max would introduce himself and demonstrate all his cool tech.

“The creative team at ON had a voice over scripted and some reference images. They had a huge amount of trust in letting me explore how we’d animate this character — not just what he was doing, but what he looked like and how he moved.

“Drawing hands is, for many illustrators, their Achilles’ heel, they avoid drawing hands and feet at all costs. Of course, when ON approached me, this went round and round in my head, ‘This is hands, Conor — you’ll be specifically drawing 60 seconds’ worth of hands’.
 

“I spent days locked into a routine, working from morning ‘til midnight. Maybe a sandwich, or a quick stroll round Bristol Harbor — just enough to stop me hallucinating arms on everything I looked at.”

 
“We looked at floating hands (Rayman style), gloved hands (à la Mickey Mouse), we looked at the nature of how they moved. The final style was a loving mix: thick and bouncy, a bit squishy, and drawn with just enough naivety to feel like street art, or something torn from my sketchbook.

“The incredible TwoMuch studio were brought in to create the 3D render of the shoe. The next stages of the project played out like this: storyboard, then a super rough animatic, which I passed to TwoMuch to whip up into an incredible 3D render.

“It was a bit like tennis from then on — they’d send it back to me, I’d do some tests, suggest pacing tweaks, then back again — until we had something perfectly timed to the voice over and ready for the frame-by-frame animation.

“I spent days locked into a routine, working from morning ‘til midnight. Maybe a sandwich, or a quick stroll round Bristol Harbor — just enough to stop me hallucinating arms on everything I looked at. When it finally got to the stage where we combined the 3D, 2D, and TwoMuch’s sound design — it was magic.”

Watch the evolution video:
 

 
 

 
Client: ON Holding AG
CD: Patrick Wylde
Art Director: Josh Gabbitas
Producer: Lucy Dang

Illustrator/2D animator: Con McHugh
3D Animation: TwoMuch Studio

Sound design: TwoMuch Studio