Nike Air 720 — Hovercraft

Translate the visual language of an air-cushioned sole into a physical object that could be photographed, filmed and shipped — without it reading as a prop.

A hovercraft. Not as illustration, but as a genuinely constructed object: faceted, engineered, sitting on a visible cushion of air. The product idea made literal, at full scale.

Built in 3D first, because the facets had to be resolvable in the real world — panel sizes, joins, material behaviour, weight. The CGI was not a visualisation of the build; it was the build.

Generative exploration would compress the front end of this project — dozens of silhouette and material directions before anything is modelled. But the moment a thing has to be manufactured, generated imagery stops being useful and CAD-accurate 3D takes over. Knowing exactly where that line sits is the job.

Look development and material studies in 3D, then fabrication drawings, on-set supervision and postproduction that reconciled the rendered and the photographed versions into one consistent set of assets.