*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

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The Client: Coca-Cola was looking for a hip new 30-second spot that would appeal to youth and capture some of the heritage behind ‘The Real Thing.’

MacLaren McCann art director Stephen Blair, who has worked with Coca-Cola in the past, wanted to focus in on Coke’s unique contoured bottle, taking the physical grooves in the glass and connecting them with an emotional groove that teenagers could relate to.

The Brief: Coke’s ‘Groove’ spot was to create a united world where a variety of abstract montages and dimensions come together representing a collective consciousness, all taking place in the glass and viewed from the pov of someone traveling up the side of the bottle, peering through the glass.

The Concept: To help build on the creative and convey the notion of different kids from across the planet uniting in this tribal world, director Floria Sigismondi jumped on board with some unique visions of her own.

The storyboards consisted of a plethora of little drawings of Coke bottles filled with diverse images, and while Blair admits it did appear to be somewhat confusing, he knew Sigismondi was the one to pull it off.

‘I knew it could be done but I needed someone that would solve it and give it a great contemporary look,’ he says. ‘It was her sensibility for kids, rock videos, current images and what’s going on that made me pick her.’

The idea was not to have predictable images but to juxtapose elements that don’t necessarily belong together while keeping in mind that it would have to be fairly graphic but not so busy that the message is lost in the pictures.

Some of the colorful, bold images that appear in the spot include a black panther walking through the groove with a futuristic city in the background, a young boy dancing and three girls spinning around in a field with their hair connecting them together. And although the client wanted to eliminate some of the pictures, Blair did a stand-up job of convincing them of what needed to stay.

While the creative director says the spirit of the original storyboards did remain intact, to get to the essence of the idea Sigismondi added and refined images such as a hand holding a world and a butterfly opening and closing, representing open-heartedness.

For Sigismondi, much of the spot was about creating something with a look that was more organic than computer-generated or digitally done. To do that, and still have it appear as if everything is happening in the groove, the ambitious director set out to get as much of the project as possible done in-camera.

Parts of the commercial were shot through large pieces of refracted glass containing the swerve they were going for. The glass was held up to the lens and in some cases moved around to create a sense of motion.

Sigismondi says she has a lot of experience shooting with things in front of the lens. ‘I didn’t want it to look as though the images were placed on top of the bottle but rather inside. We went half-and-half, doing some of it digitally, and I think that brought something that you normally wouldn’t get to the table.’

After everything that could be done in camera was completed, it was up to Susan Armstrong, Mad Dog Flame artist, to take all the cool creations and come up with a uniform look, accentuate the groove, and add in some stock footage of bubbles floating up through the bottle.

Using displacement mapping she gave the spot a feeling of depth and distorted the images so that when the pictures travel through what is supposed to represent the liquid and up the curve they appear as though they are broken up. ‘It’s not a singular journey, it’s a cutty, fast journey.’

Blair says the spot did not turn out exactly as he had envisioned, which he sees as a good thing, since in creating the original storyboards he left room for some magic to step in and take the spot to the next level.