Synchronized swimming featured in Intel campaign

Synchronized swimming featured in Intel campaign:

Intel featured synchronized swimming in its new campaign ‘Behind The Brains’ to visualise synchronous and asynchronous movement using Aquabatix synchronized swimmers to demonstrate various moves and formations. The brief was to make this visually captivating and digestible for a mass audience and the creative team at ASL Productions, who were behind the underwater production, realised it would be perfectly explained by synchronized swimmers with their grace in formations and their artistic ability with individual movement. Intel are on the verge of making big breakthroughs in neuromorphic and quantum computing and wanted video content to explain and promote these leaps in computing science. The creative team scouted for synchronized swimming teams both in Portland and LA where they came across the Aquabatix USA Los Angeles synchronized swimming entertainment group and “came to conclusion that the best team for this shoot was in LA”. Aquabatix USA synchronized swimmers and choreographers are hugely experienced in synchronized swimming for productions and underwater movement making it an easier journey for the Director and production when filming in water creates so many other technical difficulties and concerns. The director met with top Aquabatix synchronized swimming choreographer Valerie Williams to discuss the vision and requirements and to make sure the synchronised swimmers could deliver what they needed with Valerie helping to create the ideas within the brief. ASL Productions stated that “our director was confident they could meet his vision and we hired them”.

The team used an underwater camera rig from Hydraflex with an ARRI Alexa Mini camera to capture the motion of the synchronized swimmers. Slow motion was a big aspect of the shoot to highlight the movement. “The footage looked unbelievable as we took the Mini in and out of slow motion while our swimmers contorted their bodies in and out of unison during their routines and freestyle portions of our shoot”. Valerie choreographed synchronised formations performed by the Los Angeles based synchronized swimmers to represent a metaphor for traditional computing, each move dictated by the previous action. The individual improvised solo moves, developed by Aquabatix synchronized swimming choreographer Val Williams, represented neuromorphic computing as each move was instinctive and only made based of intuition and the action around them.