Nike Frozen Moment (1997)

michael jordan interactive experience

start over

This piece was ahead of it's time. In part because it really needed a broadband world - unfortunately, this was the 56KB modem era. As such, you can see that the bit-mapped images were necessarily reduced to a limited B&W palette. Though serviceably dithered, these images would have strongly benefitted from today's resolution flexibility. The piece is about beauty.

Frozen Moment was based on a terrific W&K Spot about the surreal suspension of time that seems to accompany Michael Jordan's hang-time in mid-air.

This piece was conceived by Kirk Gibbons. Unquestionably Red Sky's most Zen-centric creatives, and a very gentle soul. He was also tapped into some sort of fashionably futuristic wavelength because virtually everything the guy ever wore became hugely hot trends shortly after.

Maybe more than any other piece Kirk worked on at Red Sky, I feel like this one embodied his creative skew. If only it had been fully resolved. The full resolution version I remember previewing was stunning.

I believe the end of this file breaks with a Shockwave error, sorry about that, see my disclaimers earlier. I'm amazed any of these ads still work.

We brainstormed a long time for a conclusion to Frozen Moment- a way to finish what was such a peaceful zen experience. Aside from my standard creative review processes, my primary contribution to this piece was the idea to have the final circular window drop away from the user like a basketball, and quietly bounce away. I most certainly did not conceive of the crashing shockwave alert the follows it however!

Notice the music - we kept the piece small by taking short voice solos, and programmatically (again) weaving them in and out of one another. If you listen to this for a long time you won't hear exactly the same sequence twice, thanks to this dynamically generated music.