Pump 20

At USN we seem to be doing more and more event work. Last Friday we did the Reebok Pump 20th Anniversary party in Tokyo. The location for this one was Mado Lounge, on the 52nd floor of the Roppongi Hills Mori Tower with a stunning backdrop view over the city.

We managed to create a few special treats for the event that I was pretty happy with.

First we had to show off the special 20th anniversary collaboration shoes (20 of them of course) … now these are the only ones in Japan right now, so I approached it from a collector angle. Vacuum packs!

The vacuum packs actually needed to be hand constructed and took a long night of assembly and several broken vacuum packs to get them ready for the event.

Second, we needed some decoration. For that I brought in an artist friend of mine, Richard Byers (aka VJ Superlight) to help develop software for a silhouette screen for a shoe projection. We created a screen in the exact shape of the projected image (the shoe) and projected each of the collaboration shoes on the the screen. The software was all developed directly in Quartz, the native rendering engine of Mac OSX. To give a little more impact we included controls via MIDI and made it sound reactive, so the image shifted and pulsed to the beat.

The end result was a constantly morphing shoe image rotating through the 20 collaboration models, sitting in space with a backdrop of Tokyo skyline.

And, of course we needed some entertainment. Apart from our DJs … headlined by Captain Funk (great set Tatsuya!) we managed a live dance performance. This was another one of these strange ideas I come up with and was lucky enough that a client let me realise it. We got a group of BBoys, dressed them in neon head to toe and gave them special hoods covering their faces. These were my “ghosts of 1989”. You can see the result below. Very retro, lots of fun.

So finally, the others involved from my team – Tomo, Julien, Bjoern, Rico, Toyo, Alban, Ayako, and Marc. They are all rockstars.