Coke Creations // Marshmello
(or how we delivered over 1700 videos in two months)
CLIENT. Coca Cola ROLE. Lead of Compositing
Coca Cola Creations label was developed in order to bring different flavors and experiences to customers. For the new limited edition, they’ve invited DJ Marshmello that came up with the watermelon and strawberry mix flavor.
Along with the new product, came the campaign with 18 films to showcase this invention to the entire world and with that, more than 1700 deliverables.
credits
client: Coca Cola Creations
agency: GUT
studio: Dirty Work
executive producer: Ito Andery
account manager: Karima Ruhmann
account assistant: Letícia Pugliesi
director: Gustavo Leal, Faga Melo
head of production: Jéssica Sales
line producer: Fabiane Rivero, Pamella Pesareli, Jessica Rodrigues
producer assistant: Karen Xavier, Tatiane Henrique, Karina Gualberto
storyboard: Gustavo Leal, Ricardo Sasaki, Michel Ramalho
animatic: Ricardo Sasaki, Michel Ramalho, Faga Melo
art director: Gustavo Leal
illustrator: Michel Ramalho, Thiago Baggins
head of 3D: Gustavo Rangel
technical director: Guilherme Casagrandi
VFX producer: Claudio Colângello
VFX animation: Daniel Lobo, Guilherme Bermud, Luiz Reis, Raul Rodrigues
modelling: Walfrido Monteiro, Bruce Lima
rigger: Glauber Belo
look dev: Rafael Tomazzi, Josemar Queiroz
3D animation: Bruna Camporezi, Pedro Medeiros, Guilherme Pichler
lightning: Rafael Tomazzi, Josemar Queiroz, Gustavo Rangel
render: Gustavo Rangel
motion graphics: Igor Binelli
lead of compositing: Gustavo Miaciro
compositing: Caique Moretto, Thiago Bernardes, Edu Rios, Bernardo Vaz, Miguel Franco Alves
sound: HEFTY
the problem
So how do 18 films turn into more than 1700 (or 1742 to be exact)?
As a global campaign, we were dealing with lots of different regions and markets, and besides the language, the label changes, the can sizes, and legal questions, as well as the final destination of the video, which goes from a 5” 9x16 Instagram stories to 4x5 loop on a social feed, to 30” 16x9 TV commercial.
work smarter, not harder
And how do we manage to deliver those 1742 videos on time and with all the correct information and specs without going crazy?
As cliché as it sounds: Organization. But it doesn't guarantee you won't go crazy along the process.
the spreadsheet
The main tool to keep things organized and keep track of what is in production and with who, and what is coming up next. By the way, the team generating the videos consisted of two people and me.
To release the pressure from the team, the pre-production was way heavier than the production itself. The spreadsheet had all the information we needed to quickly make the videos.
It’s all there, the film number and name, market and countries, as well as the language, film duration and resolutions, copy texts, legal lines, end cards, can size, even the comp name that After effects needed to create, the footage that it needed to import and the file name for the render. With all that info, we were ready to make the magic happen with the awesome CompsFromSpreadsheet script.
I joined the team with the project already started and with the first film already being delivered. The guy making this film was doing it all by hand, replacing each footage, copying and pasting all the texts, and renaming the render files which you can imagine, could take long hours of production. Sum that up with all the last-minute changes and you have a total disaster and angry clients.
My role on this project was mainly to organize things and make sure that all videos could be delivered on time. So forget all about keyframes, easing, timing, spacing, and bezier curves, for two months my main tool was the spreadsheet.
scripts, expressions, and magic
With lots of assets to deliver and a tight deadline, our best friend in production was the automation of repetitive tasks with scripts and expressions.
CompsFromSpreadsheet
This script is really magical and reduced many hours of tedious work, automatically creating all the comps we needed. I’m not gonna cover everything it does and how we set it up, but basically, it will look for a placeholder comp, and replace it with the assets and texts that are mapped on the spreadsheet. Pretty straightforward, but each video had it’s own particularity and we had to find some more solutions to speed up even more our workflow.
one size fits all
This tip is really simple. We had lots of formats to deliver the same film (1x1, 16x9, 9x16, 4x5) and the easiest way to save some render time is to use only one giant square as base render and crop all the necessary formats from it. Of course, when you are dealing with the same texts on vertical and horizontal resolutions, they’ll work in different ways, or won’t work at all, so we needed a solution for that as well.
translations and crop sizes
Besides the different resolutions, remember we were making a global campaign? With videos that ran in English, as well as in Spanish, French, or even Japanese and Kazakh. Now imagine you have a text supposed to fill just one line and when you translated it bleeds out of the screen. Yeah, that happens when you try to translate “Taste” into “Goûte à la saveur en”.
Lucky us that Danim Box was invented. It automatically scales the text to fit inside a predetermined box, so it won’t bleed out of the bound you established.
highlighting texts
Youtube is a savior when you are stuck with a problem, and we had lots of them.
One is that CompsFromSpreadsheet can only import flat text without customizations, and some videos pretending to be an Instagram posts required colored hyperlinks and bold words.
So as not to have the trouble to enter each composition one by one, and formatting the necessary words, this tutorial and expressions by Workbench came in handy. Total sorcery