NIKE and their agency had the perfect brief for their new ‘Flyknit’ shoe – we want to be different and capture the running world’s attention in a memorable way.

The original proposal consisted of ground based event ideas with a sprinkling of aerial (like we do) until someone said, “can we attach that giant shoe idea to a helicopter?”  Of course we can…!  Shortly after, the OK came through and we were away with designing on the run (without having seen the shoe yet!).

The giant, 4m shoe was built and engineered to fly through the sky as 85,000 registered runners (and many more spectators) watch on from the world’s largest participation fun run, the City to Surf.

Naturally they wanted to do it in 3.5weeks time which quickly became 2weeks by the time we actually started building it!  We’re pretty happy with how close it is to real thing it came out – here are a few shots of it on the testing day as we got the balance and aerodynamics right.

The stunt has already appeared on Mumbrella and will no doubt feature in more news to come – stay tuned for the full video and images of the event day’s flying.