When Coke gave five international design collectives free rein to create short animated films and specially designed aluminum bottles for its 2005 M5 campaign, it was looking for ideas that expressed positivity and optimism. The first installment of the '07 M5 project, dubbed "Faithless and Paranoid", is, simply put, an idea about nothing.

For this phase, Coca-Cola put its faith in directors François Vogel and Sophie Gateau of LA-based Paranoid US, and Vogel's idea to attach the brand to an amorphous, inquisitive character named Mr. Néant (English translation: Mr. Non-Existing).

"Faithless and Paranoid" picks up where the first M5 left off, albeit with a stronger emphasis on original music. While 2005's edition used pre-existing tracks from artists such as The Flaming Lips and Guided by Voices, UK dance band Faithless created an exclusive track for the Néant film, "I Never Stop", that will be available for download on iTunes.

Explaining the concept behind Mr. Néant, Gateau says the team wanted to create a character that represented dogged optimism. Indeed, from the moment the blob-like, bottomless Néant emerges from a black hole, traversing through colorful landscapes and meeting eclectic characters, everything that he ingests, good or bad, is transformed into positive energy.

Vogel and Gateau enlisted separate animators and illustrators - Santiago Calcedo, Luis Nieto, Pierre Marie, Emmanuel Linderer, Eva Poulopoulou and Sara Prince - to draw each landscape and character that comprised Néant's world of 2D, 3D and traditional animation.

"We gave everyone a graphic 'bible' explaining the characteristic of each entity as [François and I] imagined it," explains Gateau. "We also gave the colors and the graphic styles of the three different worlds that Mr. Néant walks through. [We explained] the film, its colors, styles and spirit."

To create the fluid stroll of Néant, Vogel was shot in costume on green screen and later composited into the 2D landscapes using After Effects.

The film debuted at a Coke VIP room at the Cannes Film Festival on May 18 and will be viewable online. The Paranoid-designed bottles will be available in exclusive nightclubs across Europe. But Oscar Thomas, executive producer at New York independent agency production department Driver, which facilitated the job, hopes the project will become a platform to promote creativity, rather than a bid to hype the brand.

"We want people to discover more about the artists," says Thomas. "It's more about giving the brand back to the artists and letting them do what they want with it, rather than Coca-Cola telling people what to do with it."

aithless & Paranoid http://www.faithless.coca-cola.com
Paranoid US http://www.paranoidus.com
Driver http://www.driver.tv