Swiss sportswear brand On tells turns the startling sporting story of Ghanian skeleton star Akwasi Frimpong into a graphic novel in a campaign that seeks to create a new hero for the next generation of African winter sports athletes and to show the power of ‘Dreaming On’.
Rolled out ahead of Beijing 2022, the sports apparel company’s ‘Black Ice’ campaign brought the pages of a graphic novel to life in a 10-minute film chronicling his formative years as he moved to The Netherlands from Ghana and initially trained as a runner before switching to skeleton and setting his sights on the Winter Olympics.
The long-form ‘Black Ice’ video is an animated biopic about Akwasi Frimpong: the first skeleton athlete from Ghana and the second Winter Olympian from the West African country.
Frimpong competed in the 2018 Winter Olympics and planned to also be at this year’s Games but he was forced to withdraw after testing positive for Covid-19 and missing the qualifying races and the fil also captures his resilience in the face of all these adversities.
Launched on 17 January, On’s film mixes graphic design and animation with live action footage shot across Africa and Europe and features the extreme sport of skeleton in which the competitor rides a minibob head-first, face-down on fast frozen tracks.
“My philosophy as a writer and director, particularly in the field of sports brands, has been to avoid portraying the athletes as superheroes. I’ve done a lot of work grounding athletes as real people. But Akwasi’s story lent itself so directly to the notion of a superhero, I eventually gave in and went for it,” commented Director/Writer Richard Bullock who came up with the idea of portraying the athlete as a comic book super hero. “The key difference between him and superheroes is he is actually real. His superpower is resilience.”
“‘Black Ice’ comprises a highly original storytelling technique – that is the sum of its live action and drawn elements – that is rarely seen in a filmed production of this nature,” explained On Head Of Sports Marketing Feliciano Robayna. “For a long time Akwasi’s dream was simply to make it to the Olympics. Despite all the setbacks, he soon saw the power of his achievements and what they could mean for Africa. He was no longer competing only for himself or a country, but for an entire continent.”
The campaign was created for On by a multi-agency and brand team which included Executive Producer Feliciano Robayna and Producer Gessica Giulini with production company Hungry Man. The team included Director Richard Bullock, Executive Producer Matt Buels, Producer Hannah Stone, Producer Jack Beardsley, Illustrator Dean Mortensen, with Machines Of Loving Grace Animator Brett McManus, DOPs Theo Tennant and Devin Toselli.
Additional production was handled by Gatehouse, Creative Creatures and Heckler with Lead Editor Andrew Holmes, Creative Producer Coralie Tapper, Executive Producer Will Alexander, Credits Motion Graphics Maud Chapuis, Edit Assist Daniel Page, Colourist Fergus Rotherham, with Rerecording Mixer Dave Robertson, Composer Dustin Lau and Executive Producer Bonnie Law.
Comment
This tactic of leveraging major sports events through long-form film isn’t a new one for On.
Indeed, last year it leveraged the Tokyo Paralympics through a 21-minute documentary called ‘Untethered’ about blind sprinter David Brown and his running guide Jerome Avery.
Plus, in August 2021 it released an ambassador led video series focused on receovery called ‘The Power Of Pause’.
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