Coca-Cola Creatures of Summer Fun

As summer hits...so does the endless fun.

Check the cokecreatures.com site out for endless fun as you use your keyboard numbers to add to the soundtrack created by Mother London and ElectroPop artist Calvin Harris.

Enjoy!

Coke Gremlins Spot Update... Cat Piano!

If you enjoyed Mother London's "Organ Player" spot for Coke I posted the other day, there's more about them at CokeCreatures.com. The best part might be the biographies of all 10 characters over on their Flickr page. They have given each a personality, two that I like are the dimwits Crétin and Tincré, yes they sound about as dimwitted as they look. There's also a Facebook page and various other gimcrack.

The song from the commercial is available on iTunes in the U.K.

Meanwhile, some bloggers are wondering whether the whole campaign was inspired by this German cat piano from the 1600s. Yes, you read that correctly, "Cat Piano".

This crazy musical instrument was designed in 1650 by Athanasius Kircher, a 17th century German Jesuit scholar.

The piano was designed to raise the spirits of an Italian prince who was too stressed out. The musician would select cats whose voices were at different pitches then arrange them in the pens accordingly. The piano delivered sharp pokes into the tails of the cats.

Mother Gremlins and Coca-Cola

I just can't get enough of this spot.

Really, Johnny Deep, Willy Wonka... imaginations run wild.

Coca Cola brings in the summer in the UK with “Organ Player”, a TV spot filmed in Auckland, New Zealand. Set on the top of One Tree Hill, the ad brings together gremlins, disco music and summer dancing, all fueled by Coca Cola.

These strangely cute gremlins sing for Coke, or rather become an instrument in a coke-organ, and the exclusive track has been written and produced by electro superstar Calvin Harris via EMI. The track is called La La La, Yeah Yeah Yeah and will appear on his album later this year.

As the keyboard player plugs in his barrels of Coca Cola, his 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. The party gets going with furry singers and instrumentalists providing the beat for a group of carefree dancers.

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.

Created by Mother London.