Coca-Cola Installation at L.A. Live (Montage, 0:30)

Coca-Cola
Installation at L.A. Live


DEVELOPED AND PRODUCED AT BRAND NEW SCHOOL, 2008


L.A. Live is an entertainment campus in downtown Los Angeles, featuring the Microsoft Theater (formerly Nokia Theater), apartments, ballrooms, bars, restaurants, movie theaters and a 54-story hotel. At its center, a 17 screen installation frames Microsoft Square and provides advertising space for a dozen brands. The configuration in these artifical town squares tends to be — from a filmmaker’s perspective — kind of awkward. A dozen vertical banners, plus a 4x3 shaped screen wrapped around a building, plus a superwide marquee that’s only a hundred pixels tall — these aspect ratio and size relationships usually call for animation rather than live action solutions.

The plaza.
Coca-Cola came to Brand New School with a simple but powerful visual idea that had been developed in-house with the help of Sussman/Prejza: Real Los Angelenos interact with the Coca-Cola script logo in front of a background that is not red but a California sunset-inspired purple-to-red gradient.

First, I focussed on find a solution for the flag post-like vertical screens which make up the majority of the installation; their 3x4 aspect ratio seemed like a perfect reason to show simple video portraits of an interesting, multicultural and eclectic array of Southern Californians. Scenes would include barbecues, frisbee playing and playing with your kids:

First sketches.
We advised against interaction with the logo because it just never looks right or interesting when done in CG, especially when dealing with an imaginary structure in a limbo space. Technically, it would have been pretty easy to pull off, but we felt that actors standing on a huge white piece of lettering would always look fake to clients and viewers alike. The only way to do this right, we said, was to build a 50 foot wide logo and film it.

Three weeks later, we shot 40 athletes climbing up, skating on, jumping on and dangling off the massive structure built for us by Vision Scenery in Burbank. The client liked the logo so much, they decided to keep it for future use.



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Client: The Coca-Cola Company, Atlanta

Production Company: Brand New School, Los Angeles
Director: Jens Gehlhaar
Director: Ludovic Schorno
Producer: David Wolfson
Director of Photography: Ottar Gudnason
Fabricator: Vision Scenery Corporation
Stylist: Christine Wada
Shot on stage in Los Angeles

Design & Post Production: Brand New School, Los Angeles
Creative Director & Designer: Jens Gehlhaar
Art Director: Ludovic Schorno
Designer: Waka Ichinose
Still Photographer (banners): Ian Brook
Editor: Graeme Pereira
Flame Artist: Philip Ineno
Post Producer: Craig Houchin

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

For more installations:
Xbox at JFK Airport Installation