Coca-Cola is inspiring. In fact, it’s inspiring enough to make a bunch of funky cool people stand under the Gardiner Expressway taking communal swigs from a great, big, glistenin’, drippin’ bottle of it.

It actually looks way better than it sounds. You’ll see.

Jolly Roger’s ‘Taste,’ a new 30-second spot for Coke through MacLaren McCann, is a mini-exploration into the essence of that sweet, familiar liquid confection. The idea was to present some of the key words associated with it in a hip, visual way. For example, ‘Big’ manifests itself as a spacegirl checking out the universe from atop the moon, ‘Real’ is the underside of skateboards as their riders careen fearlessly over ramps, and ‘Bold’ is a bare-chested drummer banging and slamming a drum twice his height. All the while the words are displayed amongst the bubbles in a classic Coke bottle icon at the left of the screen.

Directed by Curtis Wehrfritz, the spot includes an in-camera effect specially created for the commercial. To illustrate ‘Biting’ and ‘Sharp,’ the camera follows flying glass pieces as it tracks into a girl holding what will become a mirrored circular saw blade. Once formed, the camera takes the viewer through the mirror as it breaks into the next sequence.

Using Henry, Spin’s Steven Lewis composited the passes together to create the effect. ‘The glass effect was shot separately over black and we color-corrected it and composited into the mirror that they shot on another plate. They had one pass that shattered towards the camera and we ran it in reverse so it looked like it formed into the mirror. Then they had a separate pass where they broke the mirror so it fell away from us,’ Lewis explains.

It took over 12 hours on Henry to complete the rigging and marry the effect passes with the track move. It was also decided during post to remove some elements from the background plate of the last scene (the aforementioned gulp-fest under the Gardiner), which called for some extensive rotoscoping.

An otherworldly score from Rosnick MacKinnon, featuring Georgian vocals and a string orchestra, became a part of the whole mix exceptionally early on. Having seen the boards a week prior to shooting, the music team put together a pre-score demo that changed very little en route to the final version. ‘We basically played it for them in a car, on an audio cassette,’ says Steve MacKinnon. ‘They all loved it and it stuck.’

Aside from Wehrfritz, the Jolly Roger team included dop Miroslaw Baszak and executive producer/line producer James Davis. MacLaren McCann’s Stephen Blair was the art director, Maura MacNeill was the copywriter, and Franca Piacente was the senior producer.

Music credits go to producer Ted Rosnick and composers MacKinnon and Steve Webster. Third Floor’s Richard Unruh handled the editing, William Cameron from TOPIX Computer Design and Animation was the designer/senior animator, and the stop-motion animation was created at Optical Assembly by Steve and Tom Hillman. Bill Ferwerda from d.a.v