 I remember, you know, right when the pandemic happened, right when, you know, basically all live sports just shut down. And then when the last dance kind of, I think they moved up the schedule, I was just like, this is brilliant. I mean, there's going to be every sports fan is going to be glued to this is going to be watching it. My name is Anthony Nelson. I'm the vice president of production for ESPN's Creative Works. I'm Gino Embrioli, managing partner, at art class. And I'm Sean Collings. I am a director at art class. Hey, I'm Kenny Main. I'm from ESPN. Actually, I'm from Kent, Washington, but I was proud to be part of this whole last dance deep fake thing. And hopefully people know by now that it was a joke. Not the series. The series was critically acclaimed. You knew the stakes would be high. It's holding me through the early stages of planning the creator for the spot. We were getting ready to do a big shoot. You know, it's going to be a big ESPN co branded ad. You know, for State Farm, the pandemic happened. The question and last dance was being pulled up. The idea got kicked around. I was like, what if we like, what if we went back to like the old ESPN footage and found a moment and then basically like, what? Let's get right to it. The Chicago Bulls have won their second three Pete. This is the kind of stuff that ESPN will eventually make a documentary about. They'll call it something like the last dance and make it a 10 part series and release it in the year 2020. They came to us with this first kind of conception and they're like, look, probably way too hard to pull off. But we just want to know is this even possible? And it was more of like a technical test. Like, can we even do this kind of D age face replaced sort of thing? We can all find five reasons why we can't real quick. But our role is to find the solutions. Before the job was awarded officially, we had to do the pre testing proof of concept testing and Sean banged it out in a weekend. It was pretty incredible. As pictured earlier tonight, the Bulls pretty much had their way with the Lakers in Chicago. One of the stars, Jorge Mazvedal joins us now. First of all, the suit. What's going on there? Jorge Mazvedal joins us now. First of all, the suit. What's going on there? So once we did kind of that proof of concept, it was, it was off to the races of, you know, getting the scripts ironed out, making sure Kenny was on board with everything. When they came to you with the pitch, what was your first thought? They came to me like, Hey, this is going to be a big damn deal. We're rushing it out. Don't tell anybody like there's a little secrecy to it, you know, like what we're doing. Honestly, my first thought was the weirdness of doing it, given the notion of deep fakes for nefarious reasons. But then, you know, obviously we were doing it. We were the good guys doing it, you know, for the cause of good for watching sports TV. So I got over that pretty quick. Have you done remote shoots before? Not, not like this. It really was kind of an amazing technology play to do this because we didn't know if it would work. How did you guys just technically pull this off? Originally it was like, yeah, let's look into deep fakes. But with our time constraints and production, it just, I don't think we could have made the deadline. So we actually use a lot more traditional methods. The main thing was to get him to get him to record kind of as stable as he can with the most kind of even lighting. And then from there, basically we took, you know, just the region of round his mouth and nose of today's footage. And they kind of put that back onto the old footage. Pre-pandemic, we probably would have shot Kenny on a green screen with high-end cameras and the whole head rig. We would have had multiple angles and everything mapped out. And, you know, we were working with Kenny's personal iPhone captured footage from his house. Originally it was like, shoot it on the set. I kind of remember the night and we thought we kind of had what we needed. And I think it was mentioned, there might be some pickups. So I was like, fine, whatever, I want to make it good. You know, we had to do a lot of it from my house. Did you send equipment to Kenny? We didn't want to send any equipment to him. We didn't want to, you know, we're terrified of getting any person into his home. So it was literally me making screenshots of how to, you know, get him to change his phone settings to be high quality video. You know, him walking around his house and showing me all the rooms he has available to film in and, you know, which room has better sound, which room has better light. So it was tricky. How difficult was this? Like Martin Sheen on Apocalypse Now, probably the same effort level and danger, I would say. They were literally trying to take images and audio from an iPhone that my daughter was shooting. And sometimes we weren't holding the camera because it had to be just perfectly steady. The corner of our living room somehow became the best place, both for audio, lack of echo, and stabilization, which we just put the camera up. Kenny was just a trooper throughout. There was a lot of kind of back and forth to get, you know, the best quality that we could possibly get. The producer of ESPN CreativeWorks was, we'd give notes to him, he'd be in contact with Kenny. And then there was that whole telephone thing. I can't remember how many, it felt like we did it 20 times. It was probably like three or four times, but it felt like more because they'd come back to me. Hey, can you do those two lines, whichever they were, and go ahead and add a couple others? And then, no, that didn't work. Can you go to a different part of your house? We just had to get, all right, we hope this is good and we'd send it to him. Sending it to him, I could have sooner flown to the moon, then sent it to them without my daughter Riley. I'm not super technically adept. Without Riley here, I think less dance probably wouldn't have aired yet. You know, it is incredible that Kenny shot that, texted the clip to the producer. The producer texted it to us and that was like the asset we worked off of. The machine could get it, you know, I guess roughly 50 or 60 percent there. And it'd be the first round, you're just kind of like, it isn't looking so good. But every day it was just making progress, making progress. You know, it got to the point that it pretty much passed the test of everyone, you know, by the end everyone was kind of nodding their heads like, okay, yeah, I don't, there's nothing that really stands out that I really noticed. Sean, did we deliver it the night of the premiere? It went down to the wire. It might have been the night before, but I feel like we were still making tweaks the morning of. It's going to be lit. You don't even know what that means yet. While I'm making predictions, jeans will get extra tight. There'll be a thing called a butt fumble. And this clip will be used to promote the documentary in a state farm commercial. This is just a hunch. I think we were all taken by surprise at how much people reacted positively to this. I had kind of butterflies the night of, I was just excited to view the last dance just as a fan, but had no idea the response it was going to get. I knew it was going to be a lot of eyeballs, but then to, you know, to see it kind of take off on Twitter that night, it just, that was mind-blowing. I've never had a spot and do that. It definitely got more attention than most things I do. You know, more than a 11 to one sports center on a Wednesday, say, you know, like you get a few comments. Although it's funny how many people were actually tricked by it too. You know, the media placement was a very special part of why it was so successful. That's the way we were going to get that touchstone that everybody is like, what? The placement, putting it right next to the documentary, that really is, in my mind, that really sparked it all is pulling off the fake that people thought it was a part of the documentary. The whole conceit of this ad was around that, like the way to make this media felt that way, we felt that way, like everybody kind of felt that way. That's why it got placed where it got placed. You guys were doing this in the first couple weeks when we're all working from home. What was that experience like? Just getting the script and getting into it. It was like, oh my gosh, this might be the last project we've worked on for months. And it was thrilling and terrifying at the same time. Going back to when we shot this, the rules were still being formed, right? Just think of the way you were emotionally or whatever, going back to March, April as you are now that we're all used to it. But back then, we're like, oh my god, what's this new world we're living in? And how are we doing things that we used to do? Is there anything you would take from this production experience for work down the road? I mean, pulling this one off is crazy and scary as it was. I think it just showed that production will find a way. The one big takeaway for all of this is that, you know, to be confronted by the constraints of something that we're dealing with now and the thinking around it and what's the message you like, sometimes those simple little ideas become the biggest ones.