Vapiano CGI Viral Pasta: Behind The Scenes Of The Incredible Video
If your ads are no longer getting the retention that you need, you might wish to switch up the way you’re doing things.
That’s what Vapiano CGI Video advert did. The result?
400,000 views within the first few hours.
And that is what made World Pasta Day a moment to remember!
Vapiano CGI Video created by rendersnek for World Pasta Day
Old-fashioned advertising doesn't work well anymore because technology keeps changing. Brands that want to sell things should work with creative agencies that can keep up with new trends.
In today's fast-paced (advertising) world, capturing and holding a viewer's attention has become an art. It's a skill that demands focus, storytelling, and captivating visuals to keep eyes glued to screens.
So, if you’re wanting 2+ mio. unique views on your next advert, maybe the following insights of our project with Vapiano in collaboration with Traktor Wien agency will help.
How we ended up doing the Vapiano CGI Video
In one sentence: Consistently showing up on social media.
Especially as a very young company with little connections in the marketing world, it is not easy to find clients. It’s so competitive that you need something unique. Something that shows you care about the work you do - in our case mostly "Fake Out Of Home Videos".
Our social media tactic: posting once a week, interacting with agencies and brands, try new stuff and not just have a portfolio page.
So, showing up on social media eventually lead, Traktor Wien Agency, whos motto is to do advertising for people who actually don’t like advertising, to our Instagram page and that’s how we ended up getting a good old email in our inbox.
After one or two weeks of DMs sharing ideas, a vision for celebrating World Pasta Day took shape. Vapiano's dream of creating an eye-catching advertisement became a reality.
Deepdive into the challenges of creating the Vapiano CGI Video
Challenge 1: Attention
Grabbing attention in the first 1.5 seconds is a known fact to everyone who does social media.
Otherwise, attention is gone, and every click or action associated with it is also gone and of course so is the revenue it brings.
So, to grab the attention in the first place, things needed to happen, a lot of things. At first the viewer can spot the car with a gigantic vapiano take away box on the roof. Then you notice two people walking in from the left side, pointing at the facade, which was filled with hyperdimensional spaghetti.
And last but not least, it’s not enough to grab the attention, you also want to hold it. So as soon as the viewer is done with checking out the façade, the two vapianisti are already opening the double door to reveal an avalanche of penne and fusilli.
Challenge 2: Environment
Since the video was shot in a busier street (almos Mariahilferstraße), we already needed to pick a timeframe where there’s little people, but also where we would have a nice lighting. We checkout the place in different times of the day and decided for the morning between 8:00 am and 9:00 am. Everything seemed perfecet on the day of the shooting, but there is always something that you don’t have influence on. In our case that bulky jeep, that was parked in front of the building. Which was of course not exactly what we wanted when we first started filming.
Whilst it wasn’t ideal, we had to use our surroundings to our advantage and create storyboards based on everything around us – this is how we came up with the gigantic takeaway box infront of the building.
Challenge 3: Food
As already mentioned, the probably biggest challenge was to stage the food in a way, that the viewers first thought isn’t – “yuck, there’s food on the street”.
Frame of the Vapiano CGI pasta avalanche
Frame of the Vapiano CGI facade
And so, we had to ensure that the fusilli-penne-avalanche simulation looked appetizing, which already was a challenge, because nobody ever saw a pasta avalanche of this size.
Challenge 4: Actors
The last challenge was the human challenge, because when you shoot the video, nothing is there yet. The actors need to understand what will happen in the after production and where everything will be placed. So it’s crucial to have a very detailed idea of what will happen, because you can change pretty much everything in the video, but the reaction of the humas to it is something that can’t be changed.
Thoughts on the success of the Vapiano CGI Video
The 3 Pillars of success of the Vapiano CGI Video:
Goal: A video where oversized pasta hung to dry on the Vapiano restaurant's house facade, and a restaurant filled with fusilli.
Vision: Not just to create an ordinary ad and post on social media for a restaurant brand who sells Italian food. We want to stand out in the media industry. So, we wanted to create an advert tailored to captivate not just pasta lovers, but everyone.
Challenge: Make food used in a public space look good, so good, that you don’t feel disgusted. Because let’s be honest, in the end there was pasta (virtually) lying on the street.
Why it went viral
Our guess is a combination of the many impressions the viewer already has in the first 2 seconds, plus the fact that nobody had ever seen a scene like that before. A fun, entertaining video that invited people to come to the restaurant. It didn’t even feel like an ad.
Numbers & publicity
2,4+ mio views, 40.000 likes, 617 comments and 2837 shares on Instagram and TikTok combined.
A news article in an Austrian newspaper, where Philipp Zinggl, Managing Director of Vapiano Austria, noted, "We are pleased to be one of the first companies to embrace mixed reality advertising."
Wrap Up
Rendersnek's collaboration with Traktor Wien Agency for Vapiano's World Pasta Day campaign is a prime example of how CGI can be effectively integrated the advertising industry.
As the world of advertising evolves, standing out becomes crucial. It is understanding what captures attention and keeps viewers engaged that helps to make purchase decisions.
The combination of CGI, reality and attention to detail can turn an everyday scene into a spectacle.
As the lines blur between reality and CGI, this project exemplifies the boundless creativity of the advertising world, turning the ordinary into the extraordinary.
