Client: The Coca-Cola Company Switzerland // Brand: Coca-Cola & Sprite // Date: Q2.2022 & Q2.2023
Deliverables: Assets for Branding Area LED panels, moving & still
Brief:
For a couple of years now, TCCC Switzerland is one of the official Media Partners of Openair Frauenfeld, the biggest Music Festival in Switzerland, and also the biggest Hip-Hop Festival in all of Europe. This partnership gave TCCC access to a couple of large scale LED panels, therefore the Company needed some branded assets for Coke & Sprite.
Solution:
Since those assets had to compete directly with other sponsoring brands, the goal was to create visuals that were as bold and shiny as possible, while still maintaining core brand characteristics. To achieve this goal, I played with the logo and with unique shapes, that the viewer would immediately recognise as belonging to the respective brand.
Workflow:
In order to have maximum creative freedom, my first step was to split up all key elements into separate shapes and layers, so that I would be able to take them apart and put them together exactly the way I wanted. I then decided on the hero frame(s), that the whole animation should build up to, and started experimenting with the order, in which layers and elements would appear, or disappear to make room for the hero.
The biggest challenge was to keep the animation simple yet still moving forward, and to ensure maximum brand recognition without being too obvious (and thus potentially boring).
Coca-Cola:
In 2022, brand management wanted to keep the focus on the iconic Contourbottle®, which was also the key visual of the corresponding "Real Magic" campaign from that year. For this asset, I tried to create some illusion of depth by manipulating shapes and their relative sizes, while staying true to the flat design of the campaign guidelines.
In 2023, Real Magic has been fully replaced by "Coke Studio", which introduced neon lights on dark brick walls to the VIS - a look that can be found in many music studios all over the world. This change opened up room for some experiments with vfx copilot's Saber plugin and volumetric lightning in general, and resulted in assets with a clean, yet still pretty organic look.
Sprite:
Another LED panel was booked for Sprite, since that brand has a very urban feel to it - and therefore fits perfectly to the overall vibe of the Hip-Hop community.
The global Sprite campaign for the festival season was titled "Heat Happens", and came with a TVC, that I edited to be used during the breaks on the main screens.
For the permanent LED panel however, I went with a purely graphic concept, that only uses shapes from the original Spark logo. Inspiration was drawn from boomboxes, T-Shirt cannons, and the shimmering air on a hot day, to further amplify the message.
Finishing the job:
After the basic animation concepts were laid out and the files prepared for AE use, the process was mostly a matter of adjusting keyframes and getting the timing right. The only downside was the heavy use of glow effects in 2023's Coke visuals, because those require a lot of processing power - which translates into long rendering times.
Since I already know those two brands by heart, though, and after nearly a decade of working for the people in charge, feedback loops could be kept to a minimum, and only minor reworks were necessary. This lead to a quick turnover way before the end of the deadline, and made the whole project a lot of fun.
Wanna see how much fun I had?
Below you can find the 2023 Coke visual and a quick breakdown of its main features.
Below you can find the 2023 Coke visual and a quick breakdown of its main features.