Take a Real Break

When JOJX and director Paul Butterworth walked in with the treatment for Pure Leaf’s global campaign, the ambition was clear: take a bottled iced tea out of the visual grammar of standard beverage advertising and shoot liquid shots the category had not seen. A wow effect inside a single frame. No generic pours. No template beauty shots. Every shot built to elevate the brand’s visual language.

Simple on paper. Razor-precise in production. Our job was to deliver this vision exactly as the director saw it, across three 15-second hero spots and a full set of platform cutdowns.

The challenge

Could we technically build the effects balancing on the edge of physics for real — using rigs, motion control, precise timing, and extensive testing — rather than simply creating them later in CGI? Liquids behaving in an unnatural, almost magical way, while still looking believable and premium.

In practice, that meant:

• Backing the director’s sensory, immersive vision with a production setup that could deliver it frame by frame.
• Product shots captured at perfect timing, repeatable across multiple product variants.
• Creating a modular set that let us shoot all three films at once and squeeze in a Bolt on tracks for some crazy camera moves.
• Delivery of three hero spots plus all platform variants inside a tight international schedule.

The non-technical challenge was the very close collaboration with the international client team and the production house JOJX, while maintaining full consistency between local execution and global brand expectations. Expectations were extremely high, the feedback loop was multilayered, and translating that vision into very concrete production decisions while reacting quickly to changes, without losing quality or budget control, was a discipline of its own.

The Approach

We built the production around one principle: give the director the same control on set that he had on the storyboard. It required enormous precision and experimentation long before stepping onto the shoot itself.

We worked on shots where tea, splashes, and liquid movement had to feel almost unreal, like frozen physics. Millimeters and fractions of seconds, where one small deviation changes the take.

The key elements were:

• hero liquid pours
• suspended splash moments
• tea-leaf choreography
• dynamic liquid architecture
• condensation and freshness details

During SFX prep, we prototyped and tested several rigs in large tanks of amber liquid. One of the most interesting was the bubble ring effect for the Zero spot. To pull it off, we started by studying how dolphins create these rings.

We even tracked down the technical notes of a marine biologist who had spent 21 years trying to develop a device for generating such bubbles, to improve the mood of marine mammals in oceanariums. Our SFX engineer Dziubek built one a bit faster: from first sketches through prototype to a repeatable rig, in four days.

To sum up

Three spots loaded with effects and demanding scenes, one studio, three shoot days, two units.

We worked in a service production model, so it was crucial not only to deliver the execution itself, but also to build trust and a sense of security for our international partner.

We successfully delivered a demanding international project, working across different time zones while maintaining full control over quality, timing, and communication.

Our biggest capability here was the combination of:

• tabletop craft excellence
• expert control over liquid and demo execution
• advanced rigging and motion control
• the courage to experiment and push the boundaries of physics
• full production execution from set design to live action