New Seasonal Release

Cherries & Wild Berries are bursting onto the scene as part of Red Bull’s new seasonal release in Egypt. A fruity and fizzy accompaniment for the warmer months, this launch is part of Red Bull’s new strategy to introduce three exclusive flavours annually.

Speaking of adding a bit of fizz, having produced our fair share of OOH content and less conventional screen sizes for clients such as Paramount+, Cern and SEGA, Team Grizzle was brought on board to help produce content for digital billboards across Cairo, Alexandria, and the Nile Delta, with a total of 16 unique aspect ratios, each displaying Red Bull cans floating amongst a backdrop of stylised berries.

We joined the project with the initial concept having been partially mapped out by the client, simply put, Red Bull cans float into a void populated by berries before bursting through the screen towards the viewer, all drawing inspiration from DOOH billboards like those in Piccadilly Circus and Times Square, which create the illusion of depth by utilising forced perspective when viewed from the correct position.

To mimic this effect across multiple flat displays, each deliverable was treated with a virtual 3D frame, creating the impression of a recessed area for the action to take place. The human eye thinks it’s looking at an otherwise flat display until the can bursts through its perceived confines, as if jumping out of the screen towards the audience.

The illusion worked well with the added advantage of not having to necessarily stand in one specific location, which is tricky on a busy road. With the slight exception of tall, narrow aspect ratios which required a touch of work to account for lens distortion and warping caused by the extreme perspectives. This was easily remedied by increasing the focal length and zooming out to flatten the image, resulting in a more natural perspective.

With such significant variations in aspect ratios, we also had to account for all the dead space generated when moving from a conventional width of 1920px to a not insubstantial 3456px. Simply scaling wouldn’t achieve that premium look and not to mention ruin the illusion. The only effective method was to basically take all 3D the elements and reproduce the whole thing, recompose the layout and rerun the sims.

The basic premise for the animation was relatively simple: float in the cans with playful collisions between the berries before the cans settle into the final lockup. However, as with all simulations, this required ongoing refinement to perfect. For instance, the overall quantity of berries needed to be reduced as they began clipping and causing unwanted distortion and jostling, even forcing berries outside of the framing or intersecting the lockup text which needed to remain unobstructed. With some time and numerous simulations we found the optimal amount of berries and smashed the over animation, however we weren’t entirely out of the woods.

The final RB assets along with the accompanying lighting setup came through as a Maya file, which although not our usual choice formatting, it’d fortunately been produced using Redshift and so imported into our Cinema 4D setup without issue. Although down the line it transpired that the proxies simply refused to work with our remote Render farm. Textures would refuse to link, instead leaving us with back shapes and other oddities, this left us us little option but to resort to rendering locally which in regard to render times added up quickly.

For those of you who like your stats that’s: 16 deliverables at 30FPS, all (apart from one) at 10 seconds in duration with aspect ratios up to 3456x1152px rendering on average at 5.8 mins per frame. That’s roughly 50 hours of rendering (in a heatwave), but at the cost of a well cooked Freddie, we ploughed through triumphantly, barring some colour correction afterwards in the After Effects. All that remained was for animations to be shown on numerous DOOH displays across Egypt.