Street culture is rooted in authenticity. It’s a fact that called on us to work towards creating a film that didn’t simply preach at kids. We didn’t want to hold up a mirror to them or give them some montage of overly familiar “street” images.

We wanted to provoke action.

“Lunch Money” is that effort.

We portrayed real kids, in real environments and shot them from a bird’s eye view in the midst of creative acts throughout the city.

We paired these individuals’ movements with a script embedded in nostalgic imagery that challenged kids everywhere by asking, what are you going to do?

This campaign is about color taking over everything, like it's a living thing, so the design needed to make the sneakers feel like they were literally born into being by random, forceful explosions of color. Paint was the perfect medium – and is also very 'Converse'. While the designs appear random, they weren’t randomly conceived. It took many rough sneaker shots to find the right angles and rough paint tests and swipe-pulling to see how drips, splatters or strokes should frame and overlap the sneaker angles. These master mock-ups then served as guides for our paint stylist and the retouching process.

The campaign has been been a huge global launch, running in roughly 40 markets worldwide. It's currently live, so metrics have not all been tracked. However it has already shown success globally in generating awareness through social activity (via the #sneakersclash hashtag) with 197m global impressions so far across Twitter alone. We've also gathered global press in response to our color-filled design, paintings, and activations, spanning blogs and publications such as High Snobiety, Creative Review (UK), and GQ.