The Stash holiday season officially gets underway with this spot via Shane Griffin and the GRIF.studio crew, a festive CG motion piece whose light tone belies the technical complexity lurking under its luxury surfaces.

Shane Griffin: “Our task was to design an ‘Atelier of Wonder’ for Nespresso that felt like a mix between a magical factory line, a Rube Goldberg machine, and a high-end luxury store.

“The creative challenge was to design a series of little technical machines that actually worked together to transport our products in a whimsical and surprising way. These machines had to be functional, yet charming, while also adding a sense of premium quality, exuding a warm festive feeling.

“McCann Paris supplied us with rough sketches of how they saw the general layout of the machines. During the build, we had to adhere to a consistent physical scale to ensure the products felt grounded in reality. It was more like engineering than a motion design project, as every decision had a knock-on effect down the conveyor belt.
 

“These machines had to be functional, yet charming, while also adding a sense of premium quality, exuding a warm festive feeling.”

 
“We had 50 products to include so there was a heavy modeling and look development period up front, specifically getting the foams of the various different types of coffees correct, each recipe has a different ratio of coffee to milk, and a different way of preparation, so the crema (or foam) changes color, density, and height.

“We rendered with Redshift, and used a blend between an SSS shader (for any milky coffee or foam) and a standard liquid shader (for transparent coffee). But that was just the static assets, the coffee pours themselves needed a new approach entirely.

“For instance, the milk pouring into the glass and then the coffee pouring into the milk, that is an extremely difficult sim to begin with, now add the action of it moving through a conveyor belt system, then add ice cubes on top of that. It was very tricky. We used a blend of Phoenix, Embergen, TyFlow, After Effects, and Redshift procedural shaders to it pull off.

“Some of the machinery relied on physics, some of it relied on kinematic systems, and some relied on good ole fashioned key frames. There really was no blueprint here, we blocked out the action using simple geometry, but when it came to building them out, we made an effort to architect them in a way that could physically work in the real world.”
 
 

 
Client: Nespresso Global

Agency: McCann Paris

Account management: Hogarth

Production: GRIF.studio
Director: GRIF.studio
Artists: Shane Griffin, Hubert Montag, Ivan Girard, Mike McCarthy, Nayan Bodawala, Jack Mumford
Producer: Isaac Karsen