Coca-Cola Polar Bowl took the brand's famous polar bears and animated them in real-time during the Super Bowl in 2012, meaning they could react live to what was going on in the game (or even the commercial breaks, when the bears would fall asleep during a competitor's advert).
To achieve the project Framestore partnered with video game developer Blitz Games Studios to nurture and launch a new and rather revolutionary realtime CG rendering system that hands a powerful interactive dimension to high quality CG.
The system transports high-end CG onto a game engine rig so that it can be moved and directed in realtime through an Xbox controller. In short, this means that sophisticated, Oscar-worthy CG characters can now be 'animated' instantly and simply by the general public.
Framestore can now open the new system's potential up to other clients who may be interested in exploring its ability to dramatically increase brand engagement levels.
"We are already working on our next realtime CG project," explains Mike Woods, Framestore's Digital Creative Director. "It's a bold campaign, based on a beloved CG brand character, that uses social media platforms as the jumping off point for real-time rendering. It's this kind of approach that takes brand engagement to a whole new immersive - and powerful - level."
The campaign was a remarkable success and, in addition to the three televised spots viewed by 132m people, reached a huge number of people via second screens. More than nine million screens accessed the Coke bears on Facebook, Twitter and at CokePolarBowl.com, where visitors spent an average of 28 minutes each – far longer than the length of a TV commercial.
Fans were able to interact via social media and at one point there were 5,000 tweets every minute asking the bears to share photos, answer questions or even order pizza. Incredibly there were more than 65,000 Twitter mentions during the game.
