Wilson
Phantom Motion
Art & Design
The moment a swing
becomes pure light.
"Phantom Motion" is a Wilson sports film about the energy you can feel but never see. Real athletes were shot in a blacked-out studio, then their swings, serves and drives were reborn as streaks, trails and afterimages of light chasing the ball. The result reads less like an ad and more like the physics of passion.
Make motion you can see.
For Wilson and Dick's Sporting Goods, the brief was passion and power in sport. The idea: visualise the invisible — take the raw force of a perfect strike and render it as ribbons of light trailing off the ball. Working as prop artist and designer for agency Favorite Color, I helped build the sets and physical elements the shots were made from, and shaped the look that carries that energy across the whole piece.
Not the ball — the energy the ball leaves behind.
Real athletes, real dark, real dust.
Golfers, batters and racquet players were captured for real in a blacked-out studio — batting cages and turf rigged up, hard side-light carving out every muscle, and practical dust and debris kicking through the beam on impact. Shooting it physically is what gives the light-trails something true to cling to: the glow comes later, but the grit is all in-camera.
And then it comes alive.
In the final films the ball ignites — light explodes from impact, trails swirl and coil, and the word for it all, PASSION, streaks past in Wilson red. Two cuts, one feeling: the invisible made electric.
