ATP Tour
Social Campaign
We were asked to design a group of lookalike puppets of tennis professionals for ATP Tour's latest social campaign.
ATP Tour runs highly successful social channels, bringing all kinds of exciting content to tennis fans. Its instagram page currently has 3.5 million followers. For its latest content, they wanted to transform three tennis pros into puppets!
After creating several 2D illustrations to test out the design, we sculpted the puppets in foam. We used a fleece fabric for the puppet's skin that gives that 'cartoon' look that is so popular in this genre of puppetry. It was important that the costumes could be detachable from the puppets and so we made the limbs removable too, to allow an easy change of clothing. This also allows more scope on set, changing the puppets from full bodied (with legs) to half bodied versions. Rod mounting points were installed in the wrist to allow rods to be inserted to control the hands when required.
The shoot took place at the Paris masters where the tennis pros - Taylor Fritz, Alex de Minaur and Lorenzo Musseti - met their puppet counterparts! The resulting films were well loved by tennis fans across ATP's social channels.
