Mother has created Coca Cola’s summer campaign, ‘The Organ Player’ which shows a different way to enjoy everyone’s favourite Cola.  The commercial was directed by Dougal Wilson and produced by Matt Fone at Blink.  The music track was arranged by Calvin Harris.  MPC’s Tom Harding lead their post effort; with compositing work and clean up and de-rig bringing to life a gang of cuddly creatures.

Set on the top of a beautiful hill, the ad combines an extravagant keyboard player, the bunch of cuddly creatures and spurting Coca Cola to create a unique summer party.  As the keyboard player plugs in his barrels of Coca Cola, the whole piano casing unravels revealing the true mechanisms behind the instrument.  Each time he pushes a key, a squirt of Coke is released to a creature, who then provides a note which combine with his friends to sing happily enjoying the drink.

Each creature was actually a puppet and had to be manipulated by two people; which meant that only two creatures were shot at a time.  This in turn meant that each shot was a combination of 4 or 5 plates.  As no motion control could be done on the hill, the individual creatures had to be tracked and composited together by the 2D team.  Each individual had to be de-rigged and its eyes, nose and tongue were animated to create a more realistic look.  For the pipes, straws full of Coke were shot in MPC’s rostrum and then integrated to the final footage.  The squirts of liquid were created using some live action elements which were and composited into the shots to match the open mouths.  Crowd replication populated the throng running up the hill and stop frame animation was used for the Coke bottles coming out of the ground.

The grade was set by Jean-Clement Soret on MPC’s new Resolve Suite – a 2K non-linear grading system which allows for the grading and VFX to happen simultaneously.  Research was carried out before the grading to achieve the warm, golden atmosphere of Coke’s ads from the 70’s.  Multiple plates and layers had to be graded and matched to make the VFX team’s work as easy as possible.  George K added the final grade.

The 60 second ad will be on air in the UK from 7th May, 2009.