"A successful dramatization of the product promise brought to life by good design and copywriting." —juror Ingrid Bernstein

"Tantalizing, titillating and maybe a little misogynistic, but a great way to demonstrate and explore a product and its benefits." —juror Glen Sheehan

Overview: Part of a global campaign to introduce a new Puma product, this online experience makes the print and TV campaign tangible for users by allowing them to interact with the characters from other media. To distinguish it from the high-intensity, campaigns of other athletic shoe brands, it has a human, low-tech, low-fi feel—despite the full-screen video used to showcases the lightness of Puma's latest athletic shoe. With video that visitors are 100 percent in control of and a navigation that plays a minor role visually, the site offers a nice balance between guiding and encouraging exploration by not showing or spelling things out completely.

• The video was shot in 1080p with RED Digital Cinema's (The RED One camera package) and a blend of white and green background screens were used for the shoot. The fulcrum and shoe were created in 3-D and composited into the shots.
• The 129 video sequences consist of roughly 3 or 4 video clips each.
• The video (and models) reacts to navigation selections and, almost game-like, the navigation tracks itself so the more the user engages, the more is revealed.

Comments by Melissa Jarosz:
Did you meet with any out-of-the-ordinary obstacles during development? "Figuring out a way to make the video feel alive, seamless and highly interactive. Through a lot of testing, we found that we could gain the seamlessness we needed visually and technically by stitching short video clips together into sequences. It was necessary to create a queue to manage what we knew would be a multitude of sequences. We made a demo early on to demonstrate the video loading process and to determine how the sequences would be stitched together in the XML video control framework. The video in the list that is marked red, is the one currently playing."

How did time constraints affect your final solution? "We only had one day to shoot, so we needed to be extremely prepared and organized in terms of storyboarding out every little movement and reaction in relation to how it would be used on the site. We had to figure out exactly how the site would work in advance, through testing and experimentation, in order to ensure that we captured everything we needed."

What was the most challenging aspect of the project? "The timeline. Having under two months to figure it all out, plan the shoot, shoot the video and design/develop the interface was truly a lot of work; it was an amazing team effort to have this all come together in such a short period of time."