*In This Report

BEHIND THE SCENES WITH TOP SPOTS WINNERS:

Direction/cinematography B3

Editing B4, B6

Art Direction B7

Animation B8

Sound B10, B11

Performance B12

THE YEAR IN SPOTS SURVEY:

Canadian commercial production houses B14

Canadian animation houses B20

* * *

As the leaves began to change colors, students stuffed books into backpacks and headed back to school and football made a comeback, Coca-Cola was ready for a fresh new spot with a fall theme encompassing all of these elements related to the transitional season.

The Brief: The agency, McCann Erickson, Atlanta, was looking for an illustrator with ‘a cool and interesting style’ to team up with Toronto’s Cuppa Coffee Animation to produce something unprecedented which would incorporate the required generic stock footage of happy people pouring and enjoying Coke in a spot with a ‘Fall Mindset.’

The Concept: After checking out many different illustrators, the u.s. agency selected New York-based Rich Borge to produce some 2D and 3D elements and images out of a variety of materials such as wood, paper and fabric.

Although the agency at this point was unsure how the spot would work, the plan was for Borge to work in collaboration with Cuppa Coffee, which would bring its own design to the table, complementing Borge’s creative and bringing life and motion to his drawings and props.

Since the original boards were conceived well before an illustrator was on board they were vague and needed to be revamped by the imaginations of Borge, Cuppa exec producer Adam Shaheen and director Justin Stephenson on a trip to the Big Apple where the three hung out ‘jammin’ on ideas.’

What they came up with was a concept to build three different wooden boxes, very organic in nature, with bits of tape, peeling paint and the qualities of something handmade that held, somewhat abstractly, the Coca-Cola logo shot under a motion-control system.

Short, wide and tight camera moves across the boxes meant they could light them in an interesting way, allowing the dimensions and depth to be apparent.

Next Borge created a rotating apple, a flower made out of wood and a bus, among other things, all of which were shot and composited in and around the live-action stock footage in the After Effects suite, where 90% of the spot was put together. Some of the online and final posting were done on a Henry at Command Post.

Stephenson says what makes this spot interesting is that it integrates things that are more technologically based, like compositing, with those that are more organic, like stop-motion animation.

‘It is an integration of two almost mutually exclusive techniques, stop-motion and post-production layering,’ says Stephenson. ‘It is kind of exciting and has a very different feel.’

The biggest challenge of the project was to integrate the mandatory crisp clean stock footage shots of people drinking Coke and work them somewhat seamlessly into the very organic stop-motion animation piece by adjusting colors and levels, adding noise, defocusing and basically just messing up the pictures so that they matched the new and natural background.

Shaheen says Cuppa Coffee’s visually innovative, eclectic style and reputation for working with those who don’t necessarily have a background in animation, like Borge, helped land them the job.

But he says he sells Cuppa on the fact that it is full of people who are non-traditional animators. ‘I look for people who are from an illustrator background or an experimental film or animation background, theater design, photography, whatever, sometimes everything but animation.’

And as we move out of the fall and into the dreaded Canadian winter a new Cuppa Coke spot will soon be hitting the airwaves, this time a ‘Christmas Mindset,’ on which Shaheen will once again be working with an illustrator (this time out of Toronto). The new spot will also incorporate different elements but with more of a dimensional stop-motion set and characters, taking it through the same process in order to produce a slightly different feeling.