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Brand New School Bring Coke to LA Live

Moo2u — Wed, 13 May 2009 18:29:39 +0000

Brand New School recently created a series of profoundly energetic, decidedly athletic films for a new Coca-Cola installation. The films will be featured outdoors at L.A. Live the 5.6 million square foot Los Angeles complex that includes apartments, ballrooms, bars, concert theaters, restaurants, movie theaters and a 54-story hotel and condominium tower.

In addition to their formidable production and post production talent, Brand New School’s efforts on the project included design of a 50-foot long Coca-Cola logo and the casting of more than 40 highly-skilled athletes, including tennis players, skateboarders, yoga practitioners, and more.

“We were asked to create approximately two minutes of content for Coke,” says Jens Gehlhaar, Creative Director at Brand New School. “Specifically, the content is intended for an installation outside the Nokia Theater at L.A. Live. The theater is adjacent to the Staples Center and will be the site of the Grammy Awards. Outside the theater, there are large columns holding 14 huge, vertical screens, as well as one wide format screen over the entrance and another LED billboard on a neighboring building. It is a wacky assortment of 17 different-sized screens, but we have experience with these sorts of installations. The specific instructions from Coke gave us a lot of leeway. They wanted things very specific to the L.A. lifestyle, multicultural in look and feel, and not patronizing in any way. They wanted the focus to be on the active people involved.”

The short films reveal various athletes interacting with a huge white Coca-Cola logo backed by a special purple-red-orange gradient that breaks with the traditional Coca-Cola red in favor of a more L.A.-inspired hue.

Supported with engaging music composed by Machinehead, golfers, soccer and tennis players, wall climbers, and many more athletes all interact very physically with the immense logo. In an age when so much entertainment is achieved through computer-generated models and background, the logo is all the more astounding because it is real.

“After careful consideration, we realized that it would be more authentic to have our live actors interact with a real sculpture,” says Gehlhaar. “It is 15 feet high and more than 50 feet wide and everybody was extremely impressed with it, so much so that Coke insisted on keeping it. We did a timelapse film of its construction, just to commemorate the act.”

The engineering of the structure would eventually be put to the ultimate test, as the cast of some 40 skateboarders, climbers, and others climbed it, jumped on it, ran into it, etc.

“The logo never faltered,” says Gehlhaar proudly. “It was insanely sturdy in the end, especially considering what we put it through. We used no wires on our athletes, so there was no interaction or impact that was faked. It was all real action. It’s filming this kind of elegant, completely realistic live action that has given Brand New School such a great reputation for these kinds of jobs. Also it is rare for an installation job of this complexity to be produced in-camera; traditionally the solution would be more animation-based. There are very few companies that can pull both off.”

The job was not entirely without technological aspects however. The entire two-day shoot was shot against a blue, rather than red, background, and the final edits held more than 70 shots requiring significant keying and compositing work by the Brand New School team, all of which were then composited into a signature gradient environment.

Behind The Scenes – The Making of Coca Cola LA Live

“This was a very challenging and unusual job, but those are the ones we are most excited about,” says Gehlhaar. “Brand New School is getting very good at alternative media installations, and we are eagerly anticipating more opportunities like this. We want to be a market leader in this area.”

ABOUT BRAND NEW SCHOOL
With offices in New York and Los Angeles, Brand New School is a bicoastal directing collective working in all fields of commercial art. Ever evolving, the studio continues to cultivate a sense of wonder and exploration. For its artists and clients alike, BNS represents an opportunity to play at work, to conduct experiments in image-making, and to feed the inspiration that drives the industry.

CREDITS:
Directors:
Brand New School:Jens Gehlhaar & Ludovic Schorno

Shot on stage in Los Angeles

Production & post production:
Brand New School, Los Angeles
Producer:
David Wolfson
Director of Photography:
Ottar Gudnason
Assistant Director:
Patrick Finnegan
Key Grip:
Steve Strausser
Fabricator:
Vision Scenery Corporation
Stylist:
Christine Wada

Designer:
Wakako Ichinose
Still Photographer (banners):
Ian Brook

Editor:
Graeme Pereira
Flame Artist:
Philip Ineno
Post producer:
Craig Houchin

Color
Mark Gethin, MPC, Santa Monica

Client
The Coca-Cola Company, Atlanta

Music
Installation: Machine Head, Los Angeles
Montage: Beyond Music Library

RELATED LINKS:
www.lalive.com
www.brandnewschool.com

Brand New School Expands & Folds Away For Toyota

Moo2u — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 18:48:19 +0000

Brand New School recently completed work on a whimsical and eclectic spot via Saatchi & Saatchi for the Toyota Rav4 sport utility vehicle. Co-directed by Brand New School’s Jonathan Notaro and Eric Adolfson, the 30-second spot uses vibrant locations, an attractive cast, and some (literally) mind-bending visual effects to transform the urban landscape with elegant efficiency.

“The initial treatment for the spot called for a simplified 2d folding approach, which we then expanded on, incorporating other fold- related influences including Mad Magazine¹s famous fold, and more recently Beck’s music video ‘girl’,” says Notaro. “We brought a more complex feel to this idea by incorporating different perspectives and moving cameras while the folds were happening, and the scenes transforming. We wanted to use this fun expanding and collapsing canvas to emphasize the RAV4’s features, and also as a transitional device. We had to be careful in our design of the folds, and choreography of the talent wand the camera, knowing that whatever we conceived, needed to be achieved in 1 ambitious shoot day”.

Opening with a bright red Rav4 driving down a typical-looking street, we see the vehicle approaching a gas station. As the car rolls past, the accordion-style canopy hovering over the pumps literally folds into itself, dropping it and the rest of the gas station into the earth. Just as quickly as the station sank into the earth, a multi-tiered fountain springs up. The reference to the Rav4’s admirable fuel efficiency is quickly and elegantly achieved.

To highlight the car’s interior room, a group of young people emerge from an urban café, unfolding like paper dolls as they do so. As they approach the Rav4, the airbags included in the vehicles Star safety system fold into themselves like delicate pieces of origami-style paper.

As the car prepares to drive away, the street itself folds in on itself, swallowing a long line of competing SUVs. Finally, the urban architecture collapses together, accordion-style, revealing a verdant landscape bathed in golden-hour sunshine.

“We were determined to use realistic folding techniques in the spot, to give it that elegant, honest and inventive feel,” says Adolfson. “The scene with the airbags gave us a great opportunity to employ this radial, origami-style folding in a clever way. In order to get a sense of how these structures would, or should, fold in on themselves, we actually took to folding little maquettes out of drawings and location photos, just to see what would look best. We tried to be very true to actual folding patterns, and even scouted out locations on architecture that seemed like it could be folded. It was a lot of fun in the end.”

www.brandnewschool.com
www.toyota.com/rav4/

Brand New School Creates Afterlife For Old Technology

Moo2u — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 04:44:25 +0000

Brand New [quote]School recently completed work on an emotional and cinematic-feeling spot for iconic technology company HP. Directed by Brand New School Creative for ad agency Goodby Silverstein & Partners , “E-Donor” wordlessly transforms the sad image of cast-off laptop into a magical child’s tricycle – a symbolic testament to the power of recycling old technology. [quote][quote]Opening in the grim shadows of a cluttered, dusty garage, “E-Donor” reveals a once-virile but now discarded HP laptop perched precariously atop a pile of garbage.

As another bag is roughly added to the pile, the defunct computer crashes to the concrete floor, and splinters into its component parts. What appears to be an electronic mess, however, is about to be transformed into a nostalgic scene of rebirth and childhood energy.

To the strains of an upbeat ballad created by the up and coming band Wye Oak, the laptop further separates itself into pieces before systematically contorting its keyboard, screen, screws, and other parts into the tricycle, complete with blue ribbons streaming from its handlebar grips. Text on the screen announces “an afterlife for your old technology” as the garage doors open in a blaze of vibrant green and golden light. Further text urges viewers to help their old computers “evolve by becoming an E-Donor,” and the tricycle races into the neighborhood with unfettered abandon.

Quote:

Jonathan Notaro, Brand New School Founder and Director of the spot comments, “On one level this spot was fun because of the tonal contrast; our challenge was to move the viewer from a dark and ominous mood to one that ultimately becomes filled with warmth and light. But most importantly, I like the abstraction and subtlety in the execution, the restraint we practiced and the abstract narrative. We didn’t feel like people had to see how everything comes together; instead we used the sequence of close-ups and cutaways to merely imply the story.”

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“The script for this spot was very intimate and narrative-driven, even though there was no voiceover,” explains Vadim Turchin, Brand New School’s CG Supervisor on the commercial. “Our creative team responded to the challenge of telling an emotional story with no organic beasts involved, that is to say, humans. The idea of transforming a cold, technological item like a computer into a tricycle, the quintessential innocent machine, evoked all kinds of positive, youthful emotions. Marcelo Durst was the perfect Director of Photography for a job like this one, and the lighting created in the garage is just unbelievably great.”

For all its grim implications, the scenes in the garage are beautiful in their realism, evoking a dusty sense of isolation even as rays of sunlight filter through the windows and illuminate the scene. Amidst the all-too-familiar clutter, viewers sense the transformation to come. The scene is so realistic, in fact, that the number and complexity of visual effects is surprising:

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“From the beginning, Jonathan wanted as much as possible of the spot to be shot practically,” says Danny Rosenbloom, Executive Producer at Brand New School NY. “We were ready to add effects wherever they were required. At one point we realized that we couldn’t shoot the bell on the tricycle quite the way we wanted, so we created a CG element. As we continued, we realized that some elements would need to be replaced with CG animation to get the full effect Jonathan was after. In some places, we needed to expand on the live action content of the shot in order to round out the story.”

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“We focused on small moments in the transformation,” continues Turchin. “In the opening shot when the laptop crashes down, for example, the live action was shot with a beautiful intimacy, but needed some extra elements for continuity. There are pieces rolling away from the broken laptop that are all CG. Similarly, the seat, handlebars, etc, are all CG. Matching those elements to shots with such an intimate depth of field was challenging in its detail and precision, but we pulled it off.”

Most of the action is caught in camera, or with a few CG elements. Brand New School worked to ensure the animation wasn’t overwhelmed by the charm of the story, and the ratio of film to animation allowed the creative team to concentrate on a believable integration.

Quote:

Jonathan concludes, “In the end I think this spot is cleverly controlled and more cinematic in comparison to other ‘animated’ spots. The location was as close to my childhood garage as I could remember, filmed down the street from where I grew up with those golden suburban memories – tear.”

Quote:

“This was a terrific team,” said Rosenbloom. “The clients were incredibly responsive and positive, and the spirit of our creative team made it easy to make adjustments to requests, and make this a truly great spot. Not only was the agency great to work with, but the creative partnership was completely trusting and open. Every conversation ended with the spot being better than it was before. This is the only spot I’ve worked on where I don’t have to look back and say ‘I wish.’ Everything and everybody exceeded expectations.”

CREDITS
Production Company: Brand New School
Director/CD: Johnathan Notaro
Executive Producer: Danny Rosenbloom
Cinematographer: Marcelo Durst
VFX Supervisor: Eric Pascarelli
Storyboard Artist: William Rosado, Brian Wilcox
Line Producer: David Wolfson
Production Supervisor: Jane Van Dyke
CG Supervisor: Vadim Turchin
3D Lead: Mike Marsek
3D Lighting: Iggy Ayestaran, Aditi Kapoor
3D Animation: Mike Garcia, Matt Guzzardo
3D Modeling: Adam Rosenzweig
3D Tracking: Han Ho, John Kalaigian
Flame Artist: Mark French
Compositor: Marion Ennis, Scott Winston
Editor: Erik Barnes
Senior Producer: Devin Brook
Telecine: Company 3 LA
Artist: Stefan Sonnenfeld
Sound Design: Color NY
Composer/Designer: Josh Abbey