Air Max DN8

Launch suite for Nike's first full-length Dynamic Air sneaker — looping ambient assets, oversized collage compositions, and an unveiling film that translated the shoe's eight interconnected air tubes into surreal sensation.

Client: Nike
Role: Art Direction
Studio: FutureDeluxe
Year: 2025
Tags: launch · motion · 3D · CGI · campaign
External: behance.net ↗

Description

The brief was to make people feel the air. Dynamic Air is a deeply technical innovation — eight pressurized tubes, dual chambers, sustained flow heel-to-toe — and the worst version of this campaign would have been an exploded-view diagram with arrows. Instead we built an unveiling suite around sensation: inflating membranes, an octopus whose tentacles read as the eight tubes themselves, fluid simulations that translated impact into something the eye could believe before the brain caught up.

Art-directing the project meant holding the line between Nike’s design language and FutureDeluxe’s appetite for the surreal — letting the shoe stay the protagonist while the world around it bent in service of the idea. The signature tunnel sequence (the camera flying through the Dn8) came out of weeks of style-frame R&D in Houdini and TouchDesigner, chasing slow-shutter blurs and the specific deep-red palette the design team kept landing on. By the launch the suite had to live across film, social loops, and large-format collage — so the visual system was built to deform without ever losing the silhouette.

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