We are eternally grateful for our corporate clients, all our clients in fact. But sometimes you don’t receive the creative flow that once inspired you to pick up a camera in the first place. We wanted to try a few techniques on a super low budget, but keep exceptionally high quality. A request often heard by all creatives. Would it even be possible? And how low are we talking? We already owned a couple of nice cameras, a few lenses and some LED lights. That aside, the rest would boil down to come coffee beans, deodorant, a piece of fake ice, a hair-dryer, an empty Pepsi-Max bottle, string and blu-tac. Very Blue Peter. For the record we didn’t have Tenzing as a client and still don’t to this day, if any Tenzing representatives are reading this, you know how to reach me. We chose this brand as it’s local to us, has great product design and is a nice size to work with when filming. 

I won’t break down every single shot or, give away every secret, this post needs to remain a readable length after all. The opening shot contains three cans flying toward the camera with ice flying from behind, all seemingly drifting through space in slow-motion. All cans are the same shot oriented at different angles and offset in time, so that the longitudinal axis isn’t in the same position. The can was filmed on a rotating surface with a black background, this allowed us to cut it from the background easily and duplicate the layer. Next the ice, same goes. Only fake ice was used. Once both elements had been filmed, all we had to do was combine them in after Effects and add in some ‘cool’ sounds. 

Next, the ring-pull. This was tricky. The answer… Fishing wire, patience and lost of Special Effects editing. To really sell the effect we added some mist bursts. This was just deodorant burst on a black background. Again, some time was spent in After Effects to make this look real. 

The cascading coffee beans falling in slow-motion is comprised of two angles and two different takes. The two shots meet in the middle and fade into each other. We were limited to 180fps on our cameras and relied on a brilliant feature in After Effects that allows you to stretch slow-motion footage whilst keeping clarity and fluidity. 

The penultimate shot took the longest. This began with us freezing a Tenzing can in an empty Pepsi Max bottle, whilst ensuring the can didn’t touch the sides of the bottle. Once frozen, we rigged up a hair-dryer just above the frozen block, hit record on a camera and let it melt for about 25 minutes. We simply reversed the video in the editing suite and sped it up. As rustic as it may be, we were super happy with the results. By the time we had added some swanky transitions and appropriate music we had ourselves a video ready for the World Wide Web. 

I have skipped multiple steps and glossed over several failed attempts in the interest in brevity. One noteworthy shot the took longer than it really should have is the final shot. It took us about an hour just to get a single drop of water to run down a specific line of the can, at precisely the right time. We now have a reliable technique that we’re keeping in the armoury for our next energy drink ad.