Speed Revealed.

We launched our first season with three Olympic athletes, shot putter Tia Brooks, sprinter English Gardner, and hurdler Aries Merritt. Our second season, shot with our same creative team one year later, featured middle-distance runner Clayton Murphy and sprinter Elaine Thompson. Our goal was to capture big images that portrayed big movements. But speed this explosive proved hard to capture....

We were challenged with a small budget, but our passion for this project was not small. It called for big setpieces, big backdrops, lights that were bright enough to outshine the sun – and a large enough team to manage the safety and movement of our sets. Location scouting was also a challenge. With bodies moving at high velocity, we needed enough space to catch them at their most dynamic. And we weren’t willing to compromise our vision.

To achieve our goal, we worked with the incomparable creative talent Rebecca Parker, who had a clear ambition for the project – to capture clean images of the body, to reveal speed in all its forms, in all its intensity. Our Motion Director and Photographer was Carlos Serrao, who was no stranger to capturing athletes in dynamic, compelling motion. And, of course, we were shooting with some of the very best athletes in the world. A win-win-win.

Together, we took stock of our challenges, and we got to work. We considered building an indoor track, but then we scrapped it in favor of an outdoor track. We brought lights bright enough to create shadows and diffusion in the daylight. We built backdrops that covered enough space to give our athletes room to move. Most of all, we maintained an unflinching commitment to the creative vision. This is Speed Revealed – the angle of a sprinter rounding the corner of a track, the intrinsic power behind a shot putter’s throw, the incredible capacity of the human body, in unstoppable motion.