With recent spots from such hipoisie-approved directors as Nagi Noda, Psyop and Brand New School helping to inject a more youthful element back into the brand, you'd be forgiven for thinking that Coke's latest big spot - a videogame homage from top-tier animating duo Smith & Foulkes - is a calculated attempt at youthful base-covering. According to Wieden + Kennedy copywriter Sheena Brady, the truth is a lot more boring. "To say we studied the market and saw all these people were playing videogames - it wasn't that contrived," she says. "We're like any ad agency, which means there's about 15 guys playing videogames at any given time. So you're sitting there waiting for your partner to stop playing Halo so you can go work, and you start thinking, 'Huh, I wonder what a nice videogame could look like...'"

Such is the thrust behind the appropriately titled "Videogame", from Nexus' (Alan) Smith & (Adam) Foulkes, through Wieden + Kennedy, Portland. Created in high definition, the :60 cinema spot begins in the streets of a decrepit city, where an aggressive driver is haphazardly running reds, popping tops off fire hydrants and grazing pedestrians. Then, he pulls over to a convenience store, grabs a Coke from the fridge, takes a swig, and the spot morphs into a Technicolor musical. Backed by a rendition of Paul Williams' "You Give A Little Love", the character carries out a series of smartly choreographed acts of benevolence that culminate in a city-wide parade in which even the rats are dancing.

Created in just over three months by Smith, Foulkes and a 30-strong team of animators, modelers and artists, the original brief had nary a mention of the word 'musical'. Instead, its central idea hinged on a Wizard Of Oz-style switchover from a drab, grey videogame world into one bursting with color and positivity. While the British animating duo's past success with Wieden's London office (Honda "Grrr") made them an obvious candidate for the job, art director Shannon McGlothin says they impressed by submitting a brilliant pitch. "Of all the people we talked to, they really nailed it from the get-go," he says. "They took the essence and the skeleton of the script and really blew it out."

With the spot changing into "a big song and dance number" in the pitch, the task of finding the music became the team's first priority. For that, the London duo consulted pal and music collector Johnny Trunk, who trawled through his private stash of vintage erotica and b-movie soundtracks before stumbling across Williams' 1974 tune on a jukebox. In its original context - as one of hundreds of similarly saccharine compositions from the singer-songwriter's notoriously mawkish back catalogue - it was, well, another Paul Williams song. But in the context of the spot, it worked beautifully. "I have to admit, the first time I heard it, I was like, 'hmmmmm'," laughs Brady. "It's not what I'd imagined, and to be honest I didn't know what I'd imagined, but after you listen to it more than twice, it's in your head, you're singing it and you kind of learn to love it instantly."

Once the song was in place, Smith & Foulkes began shaping the many ideas from their brainstorm sessions into a cohesive script. "It was a huge list that we scaled into what we thought we could fit into :60, and also what we thought people would get in :60," says Foulkes. "It was tempting just to chuck it all in, but I think we would have lost people." In order to help envision the transitions, the team spent a day with a choreographer. "She put together the moves for [the main character] going from a hard bloke to having a bit of a funky strut, which was very helpful and a great reference for the animators," Foulkes says. "There was also a little Coke dance, and we even got involved in it. You don't want to see the footage for that, though."

While Foulkes confesses that, from an animation standpoint, videogames no longer "feel like a totally new kind of language", he notes they used the spot's second half to deploy some decidedly uncharacteristic techniques. "The camera does some interesting things - it whizzes around and does some big moves," he says. "The idea was that we were just stuck in the game world in the beginning, but once we got everybody on board, we didn't necessarily need to keep recreating it, which meant we could break out and have a bit more fun. When we talked to the agency, it wasn't just about recreating a [current] game, but [rather] what a PS3 or PS4 game might be like."

Even though neither Smith nor Foulkes are gamers, Brady says the duo got the desired look and feel just right. "In the wrong hands, this could have been awful," she says. "We could have offended every videogame player in America, so it was really delicate. We needed someone who could push it just far enough." In fact, work on the spot went so smoothly that apparently the team's biggest challenge was working around the eight-hour time difference between Portland and London. And even that, according to Brady, had its benefits.

"It was weird," she laughs. "It was like all the shoemaker's elves were working at night."

Wieden + Kennedy http://www.wk.com
Nexus Productions http://www.nexusproductions.com