Whacko humor, a French eyeball, meathead tongues with elephant feet – these Coke Zero spots have it all. So why was the campaign kept under wraps for eight months? FEED gets to the bottom of it all with directors againstallodds and Passion Pictures.

FEED: What was the original direction from the agency?

EP Josh Thorne and CD Derek Picken of againstallodds (AAO) : We first received scripts along with the creative brief from the agency, Wieden & Kennedy Amsterdam. The creatives Blake Kidder and Patrick Almaguer wanted the spots to be quite dark, sort of anti-Disney. They were open to any style but thought a 2D or stop frame solution might be best. After a period of discussion and character development, we decided that the CG photo-real approach was best for the campaign and put our treatment forward. Thankfully they went for it.

FEED: The characters in the final spots are amazing, they’re realistic but not too graphic was finding the right balance challenging?

AAO: The first challenge was to design the characters in such a way that they would be recognisable as body parts, but would be humorous and not too revolting. Once the characters were designed and built, our next challenge was to get these body parts to talk to each other in a convincing way. Niklas Rissler and Derek Picken, our creative directors, understood that the best way to do this was for the characters to use human body language in their acting. Another challenge, was to get the Coke bottle to look as good and believable as possible.

FEED: What technical roadblocks did you come up against with while working on this project?

AAO: Rigging the characters were a particular challenge along with solving a lot of stretching problems we had with the shaders and bump-maps.

FEED: When was the work completed?

AAO: The work was completed and approved in October 2007

FEED: And what was the production schedule?

AAO: 14 weeks for four films

FEED: Where has it been seen?

AAO: The campaign has been running in Argentina, Brazil, France, Ireland and China and has just started to be broadcast in the USA.

FEED: Upon completion why was it shelved and delayed for such a long time?

AAO: Our understanding is that Coca Cola has a company policy of allowing each of their local offices to view commercials that have been made and decide whether to run them in their territories. This means that it takes a certain amount of time for the new work to be distributed and for individual markets to start showing new work.

FEED: Is this clip part of a campaign or larger project?

AAO: It’s part of a multi-media campaign. We produced 4 x 30″ spots for television and cinema. The work was also used on the web and in print. Each territory used it in slightly different ways. In France, for example, the print work was wallpapered all over the Paris metro and bus stops and the films were running in their cinemas.

FEED: Is there anything else you would like the readers of FEED to know about this project?

AAO: Working on a campaign such as this, tends to breed many stories, however, the most positive one has to be that we were always very positive about it’s outcome and we believed, along with the agency, and Passion, that this was a very strong and important piece for Coke Zero and it’s target group. It’s a detail that often gets forgotten and in this case, that’s what kept the production at such a high level of creativeness and energy for the full 14 weeks!

Michael Adamo, EP of Passion Pictures: The story I like to tell people is how againstallodds won this job by going with their gut. WK Amsterdam asked a few Passion directors and a couple of other companies to treat on the project. The scripts were pretty outrageous (I mean how often do you have body parts for spokes characters?) so my feeling was that the visual treatment was going to have to temper that a bit. When againstallodds told me they were going to take a photo-real approach and slap elephant legs on a fleshy tongue I loved it…but I had doubts it would ever get past a client. To their credit, that was the only route they were interested in pursuing and to the client’s credit, everyone got on board and made the campaign as outrageous as it could be. I wish that happened more often.

Watch them all here:

Coke Zero “Liar”
Coke Zero “Can’t Drink”
Coke Zero “Finger”
Coke Zero “Brain”

For more work by againstallodds visit: http://www.againstallodds.se/
And Passion Pictures: http://www.passion-pictures.com/

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 18th, 2008 at 2:09 pm and is filed under Advertising, CG, Feed, The Interview. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.