LBB goes behind the scenes of ‘Weird More’, from Thingy & Thingy and DROOL, to uncover the handmade creatures and deliberately wonky craft behind the campaign
Vivobarefoot is leaning into its stranger side with ‘Weird More’, a new UK and US campaign starring NFL wide receiver and committed barefoot evangelist Mack Hollins alongside a forest full of handmade creatures.
Created by Thingy & Thingy and produced by DROOL, the campaign builds on Vivobarefoot’s ‘Free Your Feet’ platform, launched last year, as the British footwear brand steps into the US market. Rather than trying to make barefoot shoes look more conventional, the work embraces the fact that, to plenty of people, they still look a bit weird.
Mack, who plays for the New England Patriots and is a Vivobarefoot ambassador, wanders through a forest wearing his Vivos while its animal inhabitants pass judgement on his footwear. A cast of puppets marvels at his “weird shoes”; a Hollins lookalike materialises with an eagle in tow to offer a more approving “Nice shoes, bro”; and a talking snail eventually settles the argument: “Weird’s good.”
And the film’s intentional odd-ness paved the way towards a broader strategic idea. With barefoot footwear brands increasingly competing around similar functional benefits, ‘Weird More’ is designed to give Vivobarefoot something more distinctive to own: an invitation to reject received ideas of what people are supposed to wear, do or be. The campaign will run across TV, social and OOH in the UK and US this month.
For Thingy & Thingy co-founders and chief creative officers Darren Simpson and Thais Delcanton, Hollins was central to that idea from the beginning.
“Mack Hollins is possibly one of the most famous barefoot evangelists in the world,” they say. “He is also a very unconventional person. Both these things sum up the spirit of Weird More.”
The script was written specifically with Hollins in mind, rather than finding a celebrity to fit the concept later. “No one could have replaced him in this campaign,” Darren and Thais say. “He confidently rejects normal in his life and isn’t afraid to shout about it. Even to a heckling eagle.”
That gave director Tiffany Whitney Chang a suitably unusual human figurehead, but the film’s particular character comes from the world built around him. During pre-production, Tiffany found herself deep in a very specific musical rabbit hole.
“I was deep in a Bob Dylan Moog synth cover hole during pre production,” she says. “I loved how the wobble and imprecision added a certain warmth to it all. I even had a note taped up during the whole process that just said ‘THE WONK IS THE SOUL!!!’. So that was the whole philosophy.”
That principle pushed the production towards practical puppetry and deliberately imperfect details. Tiffany filled her references with bad taxidermy and “janky glass eyes”, avoiding anything too polished, before taking the creatures out of a studio and into a real forest.
“We wanted to shoot these wonky little creatures with the seriousness of a nature documentary,” she explains. “The tension between these approaches helped us nail down that tone.”
The production carried that commitment much further than the audience strictly needs to know. Each creature was given its own backstory, with those imagined personalities shaping both the puppets and the environments around them.
The trio of mushrooms, for example, began in Tiffany’s mind as “front-row ladies at Fashion Week”: glamorous, gossipy characters who have spent decades silently judging everything that passes them. References to large hats, lipstick, scarves and tassels informed the puppets, but Tiffany was keen that the gag did not turn into a literal miniature fashion set.
Instead, production designer Jo Finkel translated their personalities into the forest itself, using long hanging plants, warm light and florals to create what Tiffany describes as “natural glamour”.
The snail came from an entirely different piece of imagined lore. Tiffany pictured him as “ultra-enlightened”, possibly as a side effect of a steady diet of assorted forest mushrooms, and spirals consequently became a recurring motif throughout his world. Jo even created alien-looking plants from white-chocolate-covered raisins on sticks, adding to the slightly psychedelic atmosphere.
Puppet maker Claudia Brugnaletti of CottonClaud Studios tucked another small clue into the character itself: a fluorescent green trace around his mouth.
“Maybe the snail has been eating some special leaves,” she says, “or perhaps a mushroom?”
Claudia’s process began with Tiffany’s ideas and sketches before moving into the mechanics of making each character perform. Once Vivobarefoot had approved the concepts, her team studied the animatics to understand exactly how each puppet needed to move, then chose the materials, construction methods and mechanics accordingly.
The resulting cast draws on silicone, resin, fur and feathers, with a combination of hand puppets and rod puppets used depending on the performance required. Claudia is reluctant to single out one character as especially troublesome, crediting the collaborative build for finding solutions whenever problems arose.
“My mum used to say, ‘Two heads are better than one,’ and I absolutely believe that,” she says. “When you have a great team working together, there’s always a way to solve a problem.”
That slightly rough-edged craft is important to the finished film. The wobble, visible handiwork and knowingly odd woodland residents give ‘Weird More’ a warmth that a cleaner execution might have lost, while the behind-the-scenes sketches and fabrication process reveal just how much thought went into details designed to flash past in seconds.
For all that effort, Darren and Thais are keen not to intellectualise the campaign beyond recognition.
“Vivobarefoot footwear has a reputation for being weird - we wanted to lean into this, to celebrate it in a weird way,” they say. “Weird More is bigger than a line. It’s a philosophy. But it’s also not that deep.”