Revolver gets on Coke’s case

Commercial creativity assignment 101 from Toronto’s McCann-Erickson: make the launch of a new Coke case and a new Coke bottle shape land in the visual world at a place somewhere far from mundane. Lots of quick cutting, lots of images, lots of creative latitude. Take it and run with it and we’ll give you as much freedom as we can.

The solution? Apply generous quantities of Revolver originality, inject humor and new headspace courtesy kinetic director Curtis Wehrfritz (who comes to commercials from the video clip side and came to that from sculpting and performance art), complement the live action with mood-suited elements from TOPIX Computer Graphics and Animation, et voila.

Open the tube for two 30s to shake and bake you in the product launch genre. A more compact, lift-able, accessible Coke case you say? What a dull premise. But not a dull moment in the spot. In fact, it moves so fast and is so visually textured there’s no time for boredom. Take the ‘atomic age’ setting. Young woman, retro blunt-cut hair in an Archie style. Sheathed in a simple lime dress, in a medium close-up she’s fleetingly struggling with one of those ungainly pop cases. Exasperated Betty Boop.

Pull back, she’s in this arborite and linoleum kitchen with Happy Days (animat-able) hamburgers on the wallpaper. All of the design elements (selected by Michael ‘Spike’ Parks) on the live-action set – like the linoleum and countertops and even the fridge – were co-ordinated with the computerized elements, all the way down to typefaces. Produced by topix’s Chris Wallace, the computer elements were designed and animated by Susan Armstrong and James Cooper.

Then talent Jackie Harris (a Second City comedy performer) gets the new case, no problem. Then we see how easy it is to lift and on it we see a live-action tall glass of Coke, splashing forth, superimposed on the computer-generated case as the case is moving. Special effects supplied via Discreet Logic’s Flint software.

When the case gets into the fridge, we get a look at how simple it is to get the pop cans out. Don’t just shoot a hand doing the removing, cut, print, no no. Add a perky voice-over you might hear in a bright how-to video. Show the hand take out a single can, then spend several hours shooting a stop-motion sequence of the box spinning around so you can show how to take out several cans at a time, then spin the box some more. Take something dull, take away the dull. ‘It’s a mechanical display of how a box opening’ occurs, and it’s still interesting, says Wehrfritz. (It could be observed that Wehrfritz is good at this sort of thing as he has demonstrated by shaking up the video clip genre and pulling in many directing awards.)

Non-traditional is also the defining tone in the second 30 featuring a new, hourglass Coke bottle that’s easier to grip in human hands.

Airing mid-January, these spots were shot over four days in Milton, Ont. by Montreal dop Pierre Gill. Michelle Czukar edited for Revolver and Carlo Trulli executive produced. McCann’s team featured art direction by Stephen Blair, copy by Jeff Lewis and production by Jan Riley. Ted Rosnick did the music track, Pamela Neal handled Harris’ hairstyle and Debra Berman took on wardrobe. topix finished the spots. ST