Serena Williams retiring? Is that possible? Nike and AKQA have moved in on the sports news of the moment with an eight-and-a-half- minute tribute, Never Done Evolving, in which Serena Wlliams vs Serena Williams, an A.I. generated match between Williams from her first Grand Slam at the 1999 US Open versus her most recent at the 2017 Australian Open.
It is not a unique idea. FCB and Michelob Ultra’s McEnroe vs McEnroe in May this year, was the first virtual tennis match in which a player played against his former self. It won a Gold in Digital Craft at Cannes this year.
Williams played her 27th and final year as a professional this year and ended her professional tennis career at the US Open where she won her first Grand Slam. The film shows her evolution as player, with the game and a collection of stats.
The Nike project was produced by AKQA studios in Melbourne, Portland and São Paulo to show how Williams got to where she is today and how she kept challenging the future. Machine learning was able to model each era’s playing style – decision making, shot selection, reactivity, recovery and agility based on archival footage. The virtual match was created by building on the vid2player technique developed by Stanford University. The result was seeing both Williams play herself in 130,000 games and 5,000 matches, enough tennis matches to stream for an entire year if played back-to-back.
It has also generated a new and accessible format for tennis experts to experience and interpret data.
The campaign is part of Nike’s 50th anniversary celebrations. The final gameplay was broadcasted to the public as a YouTube livestream reaching over 1.69 million of Nike’s subscribers. Lead up to the live event included social media posts promoting the broadcast across Nike’s Instagram and Twitter channels.
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