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In this special edition of We Make It Good Interviews, I caught up with Andre Stringer, the Director from Shilo and Libby DeLana, Partner and Creative Director at Mechanica, who both collaborated on this premier broadcast spot for Saucony (pronounced saw-ka-nee). The athletic footwear brand digs deep into the psyche of the runner and poses the question, “What is Strong?” To help answer that query and showcase it in this beautiful long-form piece, Andre and Libby takes a moment to elaborate on the notion of strong and their vision of the Saucony runner.
Sheina: Hi Libby, what was your thought process in making “Find Your Strong” the campaign?
Libby: We knew from our research that runners all run for very personal, unique reasons. We wanted to inspire people to find their own version of strong each time they ran and to share their passion for running.
Sheina: Andre, what were some of your initial thoughts when you were asked to work on this project?
Andre: Libby and the team at Mechanica have something awesome going! To see where the team was taking Saucony, I saw the work as a coalescence of great writing, photography and ideas. They had it going in the print ads but it became clear that this is something remarkable in the making. Seeing good writing and work is always inspiring when you first get a call to do a spot. I could easily imagine putting their words into images. I saw new ideas that I hadn’t had a chance to experiment with and that is really fucking inspiring!
Sheina: It’s interesting that the brand decided to ask their consumers to define strong instead of making a declaration of what it can be or is. What was the reasoning behind that?
Libby: Those who love this brand will always give us the best insights. It is an invitation to participate with us. You define it. Be inspired by each other.
Sheina: So, what does strong mean to the both of you?
Libby: Homebrewed kombucha.
Andre: Definitely a cup of brewed PG Tips. But in an athletic sense, strong is about finding how important it is to balance strength in the physique with strength in the mind. For this film, it was very much about the collision of those two concepts—physicality and introspection. I wanted to dive into the athletes drive and will, while still bringing their physical performance to light. Strong to me is rooted in the mind, which guides the practice, the prowess, and the determination. There was something in seeing these runners over looking these vast vistas—the implication there hints at the limitless potential in both the physical and mental side of these individuals.
Sheina: What do you think differentiates a runner from any other kind of athlete?
Libby: Actually I think most athletes are runners, they just may not define themselves primarily as a runner.
Andre: I agree. Typically running has been portrayed as an individualist activity and I was drawn to this kind of athlete because it really focuses on the inner story. But we also wanted to create a unique type of runner. We pushed our characters in more extreme directions and tried to find something new. The runner I imagined for Saucony was a more soulful athlete, a thinker. I loved that idea and used it as a guiding principle in all my decisions.
Sheina: In the spot, you see four different archetypes in running. The lone soulful long distance runner, the aggressive track sprinter/hurdler, the high school team and the paired trail runners. What do you think makes these four examples specifically Saucony?
Libby: Runners in every way, shape and form are all specifically Saucony. But if we tried to get them all in there we’d wind up with a :90 second spot. Directors cut anyone?
Andre: If we could, I would love a directors cut! Saucony is a brand that’s been around for a long time but never really marketed themselves to a wide audience. This gives you a tremendous amount of freedom to really forge a brand new voice. If you put these different versions of a similar athlete together in one story, you start seeing the universality of the concept. It’s really about this Thinker—this athlete that experiences the world around them, not just a brute force machine.
Sheina: The backdrop for these runners in this piece is unquestionably beautiful. I believe in most running spots I’ve seen, the runners are in the city or residential areas. What was the thinking behind these epic locations? And why did you stray from the typical?
Libby: This spot and the print campaign were filmed in and around San Francisco and Mount Tam. There were a number of reasons we shot in these locations, the first was very simple – many different looks in close proximity. More importantly however was we wanted the locations to inspire and to push the idea that strong is as much in the mind as it is in the muscle.
Andre: Here we were trying to bring an epic quality to the experience. Strong is an immensely powerful notion. We needed a place to set the experience that matched the message. We didn’t want to limit the scale in which you could imagine strong being. It can be more exotic in your imagination. Every time we talk about placing these guys into a specific environment, it became a gestural concept versus something really specific. We wanted to touch on a bigger notion of the mental environment—that these runners are living in their own imagination.
Sheina: Libby, did you use real runners in this spot?
Libby: We did, in fact Ryan Wilson is ranked by Track & Field News as #4 in the world in the 110m hurdles. We also shot Wallace Spearmon, Dee Dee Trotter, Linsey Corbin and others for the print campaign.
Sheina: Andre, how do you get someone to give you strong in this piece?
Andre: Well I’ll tell you what you don’t do, you don’t aspire for acting. You gotta take a documentary style approach. The more film you roll and the more situations you put them in, the more opportunity you’ll find in the film to find something authentic. Most of it requires very little direction. Most of it is considering the placement, the idea and the environment. In action, strong is overcoming a point where you think you couldn’t go any further. I used that technique a lot. Push the talent, push the crew. The candidness of the end product comes from that. I want moments that don’t feel boarded, just awesome. Just strong.
Sheina: The color and backdrop in this piece is amazing. What was your inspiration for the way this piece looks?
Andre: Between all the players, Libby, Max Goldman (DP), Tom Poole(Colorist), and myself, we were all of the mind-set that this needs to be natural and as fundamentally beautiful as we can possibly make it. Everything was shot at magic hour. There wasn’t a light on set. Max has an incredible sensibility with timing, getting in the right place in the right time, and catching things naturally. Tom took what we had and played with it. He took it and made it vibrant and never abandoned the naturalism in the piece. Another thing we all talked about was it having this 70s outdoors photography look. We wanted to find something intimate and not over-styled, so that authenticity was never questioned.
Sheina: Do you have any favorite moments from the shoot?
Libby: Driving the steadycam ATV, standing at Rodeo Beach as the sun came up, watching Max Goldman run uphill all day with his camera, the fog machine wranglers, and Andre cranking up our high school athletes.
Andre: Some of my favorite moments were the shots filmed to give dimension to the characters, such as the shot of Andrew in the water. Or the smoke work that we were doing when the girls ran up the hill. Chris, our steadicam op, used this rig called the revolution rig to skim across the ground and to boom up 10 feet off the ground to catch this moment of the smoke peeling away from the landscape. At that moment, I thought, that was our shot, that is the idea.
Sheina: Why did you chose to work with Andre Stringer for this project?
Libby: Obviously Andre understands athletes and getting great, authentic performances out of them. This is very visible in the film. He also is surrounded by a wonderfully talented team. In retrospect the greatest thing about Andre and his team was their incredible dedication and collaborative spirit with the project.
Sheina: What was it like working so closely with Libby DeLana?
Andre: Libby is an awesome, radically creative, and a positive individual. Working with Libby, I discovered she has this amazing ability to foster an atmosphere that’s devoid of pretense. Instead she really focuses on searching for deep relevant concepts in the work. In my mind, what Mechanica and Libby have been doing with Saucony says a lot about her as a creative visionary.
Sheina: Do you think this project turned out the way you originally envisioned it?
Andre: It absolutely did. Libby helped me imagine the job really early on and I really never questioned whether what we were making wasn’t going to be good. Our collaboration made it much easier for me to imagine where I could go with it. It acted as an awesome springboard. It’s a wonderful thing to work with a team on an idea that everybody is passionate about and have the same aspirations to make a great film together. There wasn’t any wasted energy because we were all trying to make the same end product. Sidney Lumet calls it “Making the same film.”
All photos by Libby DeLana.
