OLIPOP Brings Gut-Friendly Ingredients to Life in Animated 'The Feel Good Soda' Spot

Prebiotic soda brand OLIPOP has unveiled a campaign, 'The Feel Good Soda,' created in partnership with creative agency CALLEN.

At the heart of the campaign is a hero film that brings OLIPOP’s feel-good positioning to life through a blend of live-action storytelling and colourful animation. Featuring a playful reimagining of The Chordettes’ classic hit 'Lollipop,' updated with the lyric 'Olipop, Olipop,' the spot introduces a cast of animated prebiotic characters that represent the positive impact of better-for-you soda.

CALLEN enlisted the visionary director Freddie Powell (DROOL) who worked with lead animators Luca and Sinem (Not to Scale).

Bringing the campaign to life required an unusually collaborative production process. With an accelerated timeline, live-action production, character development, animation and compositing all had to happen simultaneously rather than sequentially.

“We were developing characters and deciding on 2D designs while we were actually shooting the thing,” said director Freddie Powell. “Normally it’s a relay race where one stage hands off to the next. On this job everything had to leave the starting blocks at once.”

Freddie worked alongside animation studio Not To Scale, led by Luca and Sinem, with final compositing handled by Untold Studios.

“I was really keen to push the envelope and make Untold’s life as hard as possible,” Freddie joked. “I wanted the camera moving constantly and I was obsessed with the cartoons dipping in and out of direct sunlight. Thankfully everyone involved was up for the challenge.”

Despite the technical complexity, Freddie said the project reinforced what he loves most about animation. “It requires an unfathomable amount of trust and communication. You hand over your precious idea to artists and creators and they come back with something that makes your heart soar.”

Animators Luca and Sinem, NOT TO SCALE, "The most challenging aspect of the project was managing the large number of characters appearing simultaneously in each scene. The goal was to create a vintage non serialised style, and having a choreographed action without making the animation feel repetitive. This required coordinating multiple animators working in parallel, often with limited time for feedback. In the live-action sequences, we also had to carefully balance the performances of the animated characters so they would complement the performance of the human actors.”