Pepsi response to Coke Chase

[Charles Papert]

Pepsi wanted to poke fun at Coke's Superbowl "Coke Chase" campaign so they ordered this ad. We got the final treatment in exactly a week ago. Short turnaround but it was fun! I shot on the Alexa with Master Primes. It came close to playing during the Superbowl but the turnaround was too short for CBS to approve it (we delivered last night).

Pepsi

Here's the teaser for the Coke campaign that this parodies:

Coke Chase 2013 Ad - YouTube

[Allan Black]

Hah great stuff Charles. On film you wouldn't have even tried it eh?

Video sure makes for some tight deadlines. At speed like that you should have some funny outtakes. Thanks for posting.

Cheers.

[Stephen Mick]

I remember the days when Pepsi was capable of coming up with their own concepts. They had some of the best Super Bowl spots of the last twenty years. It's sad that this is what their brand has become.

But it does look nice, Charles. As does everything you do.

[Charles Papert]

To be fair, this was more of a cheeky viral concept than a Superbowl ad, although as I said it nearly turned into the latter as it evolved.

Allan--shooting this on film, had to wrap my head around that as it's been a few years since I've done so, let alone in a short turnaround fashion. Theoretically, we could have delivered to the lab with a film break mid-day and at wrap, had it go through the soup on the third shift and have them run a one-light transfer for the editor to start on in the morning, so there wouldn't necessarily have been that much of a delay. The problem is that we would not have had time to go back to do a proper telecine of the final cut, so our color correction would have been off the one-light and thus we would have lost a certain amount of flexibility vs the Log C footage. We didn't have massive extremes of contrast for most of this spot but we did lay in a good number of power windows and there were a few examples of pulling back detail in highlights (in the spacelights above the blue-screen stage, for example) that would have likely been blown for good in a one-light transfer. Ultimately, I'm perfectly satisfied with shooting this (and my other projects) on the Alexa these days. I miss a few things about film but all things considered, I'm good with the status quo.

BTW, extra points for the first person to identify the actress playing the showgirl who pulls the pick out of the machine.

[Allan Black]

Charles, interesting .. enjoying your takes on life with the Alexa.

Is your gal Sofia Vergara? I believe I recognise her eyebrows.

You certainly work with some good looking talent there :)

Cheers.

[Charles Papert]

Sofia? Nope! They'd have to dub her to hide that accent!

Youtube commenters are starting to catch on...

[Allan Black]

Ah hah Ali Cobrin? Looks like she's fun to work with. Handels Water Music in a Pepsi spot is another nice touch.

Cheers.

[Charles Papert]

She's a nice gal.

The spot was directed by Peter Atencio who has directed all of "Key & Peele" since the pilot.

[Charles Papert]

Much less compression in this version:

Pepsi Next: Behind the scenes at Coke Chase on Vimeo

[Sabyasachi Patra]

Lovely. Good to see a version with less compression. This reminded me of my MBA days, long long ago, when we used to analyse the coke and pepsi advertising...

[Allan Black]

Yeah Saby, back in the day I used to drink the stuff and Pepsi tasted better then too.

Cool Charles, now it's 60% less sugar and x% less compression. Great!

Cheers.

[Charles Papert]

After sitting in the color correction suite watching this clip on a pristine 48" reference plasma for four hours Saturday night, it was pretty painful to get up Sunday morning and see it presented to the world crunched down onto Youtube (all that luscious Master Prime bokeh turned into macroblocking). This kind of thing is why I'm personally in no rush to embrace 4K except for theatrical projection--we rarely get to see 1080 as good as it should be as it is. I'm always surprised to note how much better Bluray is than Directv, and it's not like Bluray is the end-all and be-all.

Incidentally, I guess we did good--tomorrow morn I'm off to Charlotte NC to shoot a Pepsi Max spot that was sent our way right after this one broke!

[Bob Hart]

Thanks for posting and for the few minutes I spent well amused from watching this one.

[Allan Black]

Charles, yep, I know what you mean about nailing the show then having it hammered by some delivery system. YouTube is cruel.

Well I for one am going to miss that spot. I got to love it. I feel for Ali when she cracks her shoe on that machine, she probably couldn't claim for it.
I wanted to give her a hug.

And I'd contribute to a fund to get the cowboy some rope lessons, and maybe buy that guys CDs.

My wife and I drove through Nth Carolina last November, nice folks. Please let's know what happens next.

Cheers.

[Charles Papert]

Ha, thanks Allan, although Ali is the other showgirl (at the end, with the pick). The one breaking her heel off in the machine is Caitlin O'Connor. I've worked with her a few times and she is a sweet gal, she's modeled for Maxim quite a bit. Try an image search with those terms--it likely won't disappoint.