Coors 'Launch Aluminum Pint'

When Coors Light and Draftfcb asked Framestore to help them tell the world about their new re-sealable wide mouth bottle Silver Bullet Aluminum Pint , they said that they wanted to launch the bottle in the truest sense of the word with a spot that features a NASA-inspired rocket launch. Framestore, as always, was up to the challenge of directing and producing the spot.

Butler and Hulin forged an early collaborative relationship with the agency working together to design a detailed previz for this ambitious concept. It quickly became apparent that there were going to need to be some creative solutions in order to create a full scale launch sequence. "Understanding what we needed to achieve both from a narrative and visual effects point of view gave us a unique perspective in making this commercial. At a time when miniatures and helicopter shoots become increasingly less compatible with commercial production budgets using digital production techniques intelligently seems obvious way forward" explains Murray Butler, Director and  Head of Flame. "We wanted to maintain a filmic quality and always stayed focus on the drama and realism. With that in mind we had to keep reminding ourselves we were launching a giant beer vessel into space! We decided that we would only shoot the actors and then put all our energy into creating the launch scene and the mission control set digitally at Framestore"

"The Mission Control scene was a lot of fun to direct but it was a real technical exercise. In reality we only had one desk and it was shot and dressed for 8 different positions of the set on the green-screen stage.Then composited together in post to create a tense and busy Mission Control," said Hulin, Director and Head of CG. "When you are dealing with something as iconic as mission control we had to make sure that every detail, from the levers, radars and screens on the desktops to the graphs we projected on the wall, were as authentic as possible."

"In order to make the beer bottle look cold and frosty, we needed to use a huge amount of vfx. We added drops of water, vapor, frostiness and bits of ice," explained Butler. "We had to make sure the condensation was realistic and visible enough to make the bottle look as cold as the new aluminum Coors Light bottle Silver Bullet Aluminum Pint really is, but we had to make sure the condensation was not so large that it dwarfed the can."

"The volume of VFX in this spot was huge, the surrounding environment, the bottle, the billowing smoke, the shot of the bottle traveling through space, they all took 100s of layers to render them realistically. But it was all worth it, we love the epic feeling of this spot. This spot shows off great CG, matte painting and compositing. It's what we love doing!"