How Do You Taste 7UP with Only Your Eyes and Ears? Behind the Scenes with Chuck Studios

When 7Up called Chuck Studios with this brief, it was all systems go. The team knew something special was in the stars here. Director / DOP and Chuck Studios co-founder Olaf van Gerwen ascended the directing chair.

7Up is the original lemon & lime soda drink. The campaign idea out of the London creative agency was: what would the refreshment and clarity of 7Up look like in a Zero Gravity environment? Here, Chuck Studios explains the process. 

Then how does one start?

One assembles an awesome team. One researches. One storms brains. Weightlessness brings you from NASA to MIT, from Sonic Levitation to Hollywood action sequences. Our world suddenly revolved around explosions, immersions, droplets, globules, fizz, slices, wedges, cubes and vortexes.

A world was to be designed that reflects the 7Up’s brand values and reflects the refreshment and transparency. Every shot was designed and laid out in a detailed shooting board. We set ourselves the near impossible task of filming all shots in camera, including weightlessness, time-slice technology and many other gravity-defying impossibilities.

Research & development

Four solid weeks of testing commenced for our ingenious in house SFX team. We put servo engines, robotics and pneumatics to work to make droplets fly, slices swirl and liquids dance to our beat. We flew in ultra high speed cameras from abroad because usual camera speeds were nowhere near enough for the explosions we needed to capture in big close-ups. We went up to a staggering 15000 frames per second.

Four days of shooting

We shot for fours day with two units, making every second count and every pixel move. The intense shooting days were conducted under Covid restrictions: client and agency on remote calls and crew distancing. Not the easiest way to work but we did it. We paid amazing amounts of attention to every bubble, every slice of lemon, each lime piece and every single droplet on the side of our glass.

Cutting, sounding, musicing, cgi-ing

In editing we brought it all together. Sound effects were added, creating that extra layer of fizz and taste cues. Parallel to it, our friends at MassiveMusic created a bespoke soundtrack and our post production partners at Glassworks London created the shots that we could not. Their mastery at creating photorealistic images is just jaw dropping.