Continuing a three-year collaboration with Nike, creative collective Tronic Studio teamed with interactive agency AKQA/San Francisco on a trio of 15-second all-CG spots for Nike's branded "Flight," "Uptempo" and "Force" basketball shoes, for Asian broadcast and retail point-of-sale use.

Last year Tronic crafted a series of innovative Web animations to showcase the new Nike Air Jordan XX; previously the studio worked with Nike on their featured products on Nikelab and, as part of the Nike Speed campaign, directed and animated a fully-CG short film, "A Long Time Ago, Tomorrow," which documented one man's attempt to travel at the speed of light.

"Our work with AKQA extends our relationship with Nike in exciting new directions," says Tronic Studio creative director Jesse Seppi.

"When we started working with Nike we represented the shoes' architecture in CG, then last year we used motion capture to animate the Air Jordan XXs.

For the three new branded shoes our brief was to show Flight, Uptempo and Force role-playing as various vehicles.

The challenge was to maintain the integrity of the shoes, not to transform them into CG vehicles."