The Mighty Concord - Welch’s
Mighty Comes In Many Sizes
No Drunk Texts
The Mighty Concord
550 Grapes (looping, silent)
The client story.
Welch’s has been around since 1869. Their flagship Concord Grape Juice has been a staple in American homes for all of living memory. Trouble was, with the [very justified] 21st-century pushback against artificial flavors and high-fructose corn syrup, the brand’s familiarity almost became a liability. How could a legacy brand possibly embody all of our fancy modern preferences?
With The Mighty Concord, Genuine worked with Welch’s to make a fun yet impassioned case that today’s kiddos were still getting the good stuff when they were drinking Welch’s. Across four hero spots and a batch of complementary social cutdowns, we touted the antioxidants, vitamin C, and heart-health promoting polyphenols that have made the Concord grape mighty.
The craft story.
The Concord grape is Welch’s greatest brand asset, and they needed to protect its integrity at all costs. So when Genuine pitched a whimsical campaign of social videos with anthropomorphized grapes as characters, we knew we had our work cut out for us. While our grapes would move with character, accompanied by lighthearted copy and upbeat music, visually they had to carry the iconic look of real Concord grapes as photorealistically as possible.
Most of the character animation for this campaign was achieved with dynamics, but this spot required a little more … backbone.
I knew that rigging and animating grapes—little more than slightly oblong spheres—wouldn’t be the biggest lift for this campaign. Instead, of the eighty hours invested in the first deliverable, almost forty were spent on materials and look development.
What gives Concord grapes their iconic purple color? If I was going to build a physically accurate material for our hero grape, I had to become a mini-expert in botany. Grapes of all varieties get their color and finish from three parts of their anatomy: the flesh, the skin, and the “bloom,” a waxy coating that grapes secrete in order to protect themselves from bacteria and harsh weather. The flesh of a Concord grape, believe it or not, is bright green (with the occasional reddish individual). Its skin, by contrast, is a dark purple, similar to a cranberry in certain kinds of light, and sometimes leaning cooler, toward blueberry, in other circumstances. Finally, the bloom looks whitish with just a hint of lavender, and its waxy texture significantly diffuses the underlying colors and reflectance. Nailing the material meant striking the right balance between the different properties of those three blended layers, and rendering the results under the right kind of light.
Materials breakdown. The skin and bloom were actually separate materials to make iterating for multiple grapes a little easier. The base color was based on a Fresnel shader that leaned red toward the edges and blue at the center, which helped approximate the passage of light through the flesh.
Working in Cinema 4D’s Physical renderer, my approach was to build up these different layers just as they’d appear in nature. Due to Physical’s speed limitations, I had to forego proper subsurface scattering in favor of layered red and blue noise to approximate the interplay between the flesh and skin, but otherwise I did my best to build up reflectance, diffusion, and bump in a 1:1 relationship with the grape’s anatomy. Keeping the bloom separated from the rest of the material also made iterating the treatment across multiple grapes a little less of a headache.
The biggest hurdle in The Mighty Concord’s look development was the Physical renderer itself. While beautiful, consistent results were absolutely gettable, those results came at a significant cost in render time. Small tweaks were tough to test interactively, which in one case led to unexpected texture sliding issues later on in the campaign’s lifecycle. In addition, Physical’s lack of a node-based material editor, and the finickiness of the Set Driver/Set Driven method of quick Xpresso rigging made iterating the materials for multiple grapes a lame manual job.
Technical challenges aside, we also ran into issues of context. This entire campaign was working toward a deep respect for the client’s product, so they were understandably particular about where the overall color of the material netted out. However, up until that point, Welch’s usually showcased their grapes in context: in bunches, on vines, or bountifully piled in baskets. When shown in isolation, without a reference for scale, and especially on a novel color like the pale purple field we’d developed to brand the campaign, we ran into significant issues getting the iconic purple color dialed in just right. Furthermore, the simultaneous contrast we’d created between the grape and its environment actually shifted how the color we were building was perceived, with the grape appearing too much like a cranberry in one draft and too much like a blueberry in the next. When I sampled colors from my renders and compared them to photo references, we could tell the renders were right on the money, but the grape just didn’t look right in context. It was a tough balancing act that ultimately required us to introduce an inaccurate amount of blue in the color grading phase to sell the grape as purple on that particular background. This solution was so delicate that if the light purple background was turned off, the whole effect failed! Color’s a tough challenge any day of the week, and material work for food, in particular, introduces layers of complexity and unique challenges.
Personal story
Unlike The Age of Intelligent Things, with its emphasis on hard surfaces and uniform, often man-made materials, The Mighty Concord put organic forms under an uncommonly tight microscope, and asked them to do impossible things. The brief was to make it look real, make it look delicious, and then rig it with bones and anthropomorphize it: a series of ever-narrowing needles to thread if I ever heard one.
My memories of this campaign were as contrasty as our final grape material; with low lows as both the client and our internal team reacted with pareidolic concern over an early iteration of a grape stem that vaguely read as phallic, and high highs when the team first saw our little grape breathe a huge sigh of relief after shoving a 64-ounce bottle of its own viscera onto its mauve stage. It was as valuable a lesson in appreciation for the hard work of a food photographer as a lesson in 3D character rigging.
Credits
All 3D execution and compositing by Jared Flynn.
Agency: Genuine
Client: Welch’s