Coca Cola 'Avatar' (Super Bowl)

Working out of Nexus, 2009 Academy Award nominees Alan Smith and Adam Foulkes directed this striking new spot for Coca Cola. Nexus was also responsible for the beautiful and witty animated 3D avatar figures that appear throughout the spot. Framestore's role was to artfully composite the animated avatars into the numerous scenes that tell the spots simple story.

The Buenos Aires shoot was attended for Framestore by Creative Director Mike McGee, with VFX Supervision under the aegis of William Bartlett, assisted by Darran Nicholson. “The trick during compositing,” Bartlett recalls, “Was to make the avatars look slightly 'off' in terms of their presence in these scenes. They are 'there', in so far as they represent some of the people in the scenes, but they are 'not there' in the way that, say, a monster in a movie is supposed to be there. So I had to take Nexus's beautiful figures and add some digital 'scuff' to them – making some flicker slightly, for example. I used various devices to do this – creating a sort of 'jpeg compression', an RGB colour shift – all to help create the right level of 'thereness'.