Rebrand Launch Film

The first aspect of this project entailed a 60-second introduction to the brand. The film was to be projected on a giant screen at the launch event and then needed to be further broken down into social media deliverables, creating some tricky levels of restriction to navigate.

Anamorphic Billboards

The biggest part of this project was producing 13 different anamorphic billboards for locations across the country. Not only were the aspect ratios and use cases drastically different from location to location, but also three of the billboards played out across curved screens, requiring us to create a dynamic animation with depth that could be viewed from a specific viewing angle for maximum impact.

Digital Asset Creation

We knew that the Pepsi logo and cans would be held up to a lot of scrutiny in our animations, so we spent a lot of time making sure that the topology and materials were of the highest quality.
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We were supplied a template for the new 3D logo but in order to ensure that it could work in motion, we re-topologised and re-textured the supplied CAD model, helping to show it off in our unique lighting setups and giving us a fidelity that allowed for close ups.
When it came to the cans, our goal was to give them a hyper-realism that would make the viewer want to reach out and grab them. We paid particular attention to the reflectivity of the metallic shaders and for the classic appearance of condensation, we opted for geometry to maximize how the light played on the cans.

From A Certain Point of View

Nailing the perspective for each screen required us to construct the screen in a digital 3D space and then pick an optimal viewing angle. For our flat billboards, we decided to go with a straight-on "catch all" angle to maximise visibility. For our anamorphic billboards, we needed to make sure that our 3D reconstructions matched every angle and curve of the physical screen. Once this set up was complete, we could move onto creating our world and animation within this 3D environment.

Finding Room

The biggest creative question we needed to tackle involved building an environment for the cans to live in. We began exploring environments that had an urban design aesthetic -- in particular, we liked the idea of using neon lights because they look cool as props but also provide awesome highlighting on the cans.

Animation

Now for the fun part. We approached the animation process in layers, starting by rigging and animating a room that would open and close. We wanted to make sure the room was mechanically sound, so we reverse-engineered how each part of the room would retract or fold in order to allow for a seamless opening. Watch closely and you'll catch a lot of detail that the average viewer may miss!

Making a splash

Although not part of the original brief, during the animation process we realised that we needed secondary elements to add visual impact and help put the "refreshing" in "brand refresh". We did this by adding ice cubes secondary to our cans, cold mist exiting the room as it slid open, and dynamic droplets generated by the cans and water tank inside the room. We created procedural simulation systems in order to generate these. Our keyframe animation was custom across seven layouts, so we needed the simulation systems to be robust enough to handle the unique animations we were going to feed into it but we also needed them to be highly procedural and automated in order to meet a tight deadline.

The Final Stretch

Once we had our final renders, there was one more hurdle to overcome: to create the anamorphic illusion, we needed to re-map our renders onto a flat surface so that they could be played correctly on the screens. We used this method on every billboard no matter the complexity to make sure that everything was pixel perfect. Using the UV data generated in our first step, we could convert our perspective renders right inside comp without round-tripping back into a 3D software. This gave us great flexibility, and in the case of one particularly tricky billboard with three sides, we could easily combine different viewing angle renders into one seamless video that allowed the billboard to be viewed from anywhere with minimal distortion.

When it finally all came together, we had created 13 anamorphic billboards over a span of 10 weeks to be played across the country, announcing Pepsi's new brand identity in South Africa.