To celebrate adidas Originals bringing back its iconic late-1980s ZX750 runners to China in a limited edition ‘bluebird dark slate’ colorway, we executed an epic guerrilla street-art campaign. The campaign engaged street artist crews in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Chengdu to bomb their hometowns with interpretations of the shoes in varied art styles.

Before hitting the streets, we pre-designed a stop-motion animation with hundreds of frames. Each frame of the animation featured the shoes in different positions. The frames were assigned to different artists around the country who had the freedom to recreate them in their own art stye. When the artists executed their artwork on the city walls, our photography team captured hi-res photos of each artwork. These photos were reassembled as the frames in this stop-motion video.

The animation tells the story of the ZX750s going on a nationwide journey while coming alive on city walls across China. The shoes’ urban adventure has them walking, jogging, jumping, spinning, dancing, etc., while the street-art styles and techniques morph from wheatpaste, to stencil, spray paint, marker, and stickers. The animation also links up a few select storefront treatments we incorporated into the campaign.