Established in 2016, Vignette Media is a high end commercials production company made up of five talented directors. The company kicked off with a bang when in their opening week they received a brief to shoot the new Pepsi Sting commercial for the East African market.
“The Pepsi Sting Commercial was Vignette’s maiden production and what a way to start the company! This was as close as it gets to a model production, naturally a function of having a dream team of creative and production talent, like Tim Beckerling and other key right brains, awesome agency professionals from Net#work BBDO and of course a wonderful and open minded client,” says MQ Ngubane, director of the spot and founding member of Vignette Media.
Ngubane says that the brief from Net#work BBDO was more of a copycat concept. The Pepsi Sting brand had previously produced an international commercial and Vignette was asked to draw inspiration from that spot. “But, after cups of good coffee, and hours of creative deliberation, we knew that it was imperative for us to sell something new and unique. Something we believed could be different and relatable to the East African market,” he explains.
In the commercial, a young woman having car troubles is stuck on the side of the road, along comes a young man, with a cooler box filled with Pepsi Sting energy drinks. All colours – besides the bottles of energy drinks – are washed out indicating a dull, bland environment. The young man takes a sip of his Pepsi Sting and begins to dance electrically, accidentally spilling some on the ground which ignites the picture, bringing it to life with vibrant colours and movement.
Ngubane says that he wanted to showcase a world in need of something…a world in a desperate situation…a world needing the power of the Sting. “Which then worked out well visually as the colour and life returns after a single drop lands on the ground,” he comments.
“I’m a big fan of the bleach bypass look and feel. Naturally, being a Tony Scott fan (unashamedly), I love what he did on the film titled Domino, where he went out to research different ways of visually narrating the effects of drugs – almost a mature visual expression than that of Steven Soderbergh’s drug related features. And then of course, the same can be said for The Book of Eli directed by the talented Hughes Brothers. The bleach bypass look clearly sets this world apart and helps the viewers zoom into the extra ordinary environment,” he expands.
Having done a similar bleach bypass technique before, the one difference with this treatment was that Ngubane wanted to incorporate another technical technique called Time Slice: “To best achieve this technique, I normally make use of Arri’s Phantom gems but this time around, the DOP and myself decided to go with the Red Dragon. Naturally, to achieve the frame manipulation technique where in one frame, you can speed up or slow down various elements, it’s always best you go with a camera that gives you high frame rates. But I must say, this one was slightly tricky as not only did I want the time slice element, I also wanted the bleach bypass look, which then brought about the use of a 12×12 Chroma cloth, to allow for us to manipulate the background and really push that IN NEED environment.”
DOP Clive Saacke shot the spot using the Red Dragon, keeping the lensing quite simple – “a 50mm, 80mm, and once or twice we actually went as wide as 20mm.” He continues, “With this camera, not only do you get high frame rates at 240 frames per second on 2k, you can capture at least 10x more pixels than HD and the greater the resolution, the greater the latitude in Online to push the look and time slice technique.”
Nic Goodwin from Nova edited the Pepsi Sting commercial with Digital Union taking care of the visual effects. Adam Howard handled audio and Michelle Wilson added her colouring touch. Fikile Mogodi was assistant director on the spot which was produced by Tshogofato Phiri along with executive producer Zam Nkosi.
