ABOUT

When the original Banana Cream flavour was launched in the summer of 2022, OLIPOP couldn’t have predicted it would sell out in a little less than six weeks. Their customers wanted more of this totally bananas soda, so their team got in touch to see how we could bring the flavours to life in an exciting set of social assets.

Brief

OLIPOP wanted to create a collection of colourful and playful social content that would showcase the tantalising mix of flavours in the Banana Cream soda – bananas, ice cream, whipped cream and vanilla. Working closely with OLIPOP, our creative team helped develop the initial Storyboard and Key Visual sketches they provided into the set of assets we’d need to bring this soda to life in full CGI glory.

Sculpting Ingredients

Each of the ingredients needed to be meticulously sculpted to feel true to life. The look development process included a number of iterations where we crafted the banana slices, vanilla pod and flower, whipped cream and ice cream. Each ingredient had a number of variations so we could populate our content with deliciously unique CGI food. We wanted to create a hyperreal feeling to the animation, while maintaining a high level of photorealism across every asset.

Execution

The can needed to feel like it was bursting with flavour and the campaign demanded a sense of playfulness in the animation. The idea was to have the can spinning in a 360 motion with the ingredients whipping out and back in again, all within a 6 second clip. We explored versions of this, with a cut into the can to show closeup detail, before resting back on our hero shot.

As we had been briefed to make the animation work for 3 aspect ratios that would work across a variety of digital channels – 1:1, 16:9 and 9:16. It was vital that we framed the action uniquely for each aspect ratio to ensure none of the action was lost in any version.

With the action and timing locked, we took the final step of texturing and lighting the animation. Our artists’ expertise with food CGI ensured every element stood up to photoreal test and popped on screen. Once we’d made things shine in our animation, we took these to our stills to give a consistent look and feel across all campaign assets. We used the colour palette of the Banana Cream branding as the base for our backgrounds and used a gradient closer to the banana ingredient colours where we wanted the can to pop more.

Hi-res assets

While our assets were destined for social use, we pride ourselves on creating future-proof assets that can be repurposed for any use case. We designed our can to work at much higher resolution than was required for the campaign, using Houdini’s procedural workflow and our ‘Digital Distillery’ tool to add thirst-inducing condensation on the can. This gave our hero asset the high level of detail it needed to work in this project and any other potential campaigns that OLIPOP might want to create.