PEPSI

Pepsi, Thirsty For More is a self-directed spec commercial, an anime club spot for an existing brand rather than a brand I built from scratch. It's a deliberate departure from the photoreal work: no naming, no packaging, no product to design. Just art direction and filmmaking, taking a hand-drawn storyboard all the way to a finished fifteen-second cut.

The point was range. Same pipeline, pointed at a completely different visual language, to prove it holds outside the polished-product world.

A neon-soaked anime club, cut to a bass drop. Energy, movement, refresh, the can as the hero of a world that feels like a music video rather than a soda ad.

The whole thing lives in a bold 2D cel-shade style, a hard left turn from the realism, chosen precisely because it's the harder thing to keep consistent across a moving shot.

One style lock, carried into every frame: bold clean lineart, cel shading with hard neon rim light, deep navy-black club darkness cut by electric pink, cyan and Pepsi-blue beams, and high-contrast speed lines on every move.

Reference-driven, so the look never drifts from shot to shot.

It started as a nine-panel anime storyboard: the logo through a tunnel, the title over the crowd, the hero with the can, the b-boy freeze, the cap girl drinking, the dance-off, the can to camera, the end-card.

That sheet was the style anchor and the shot list in one, the single thing every later asset was measured against.

Everything ran reference-first. A hero character sheet and a dancer-girl sheet locked identity across every beat; a twelve-view can turnaround kept the product on-model; then a single five-beat reference board, can, bottle, both characters, the club and the style in one frame, drove the video generation.

The branding travels through the references, never the prompts. In text the product is only ever "a navy-blue cola can with a red-white-and-blue sphere emblem", which keeps the generator's IP filter happy while the real brand stays exact in the image.

The best beats, pulled from the cut as stills.

Built through Higgsfield. GPT Image 2 and Nano Banana Pro for the character sheets, the can turnaround and the reference board, all style-locked to the storyboard so identity and branding held. Seedance 2.0 for the video, which takes one reference image per call, so the five-beat board did the heavy lifting.

Fast, cheap probes first to validate the beats and catch drift, an early cut let a character's outfit shapeshift between shots, fixed by locking the wardrobe in the prompt, then a standard-quality master once the read was clean.

This is the picture-locked master. The remaining polish is post: the THIRSTY FOR MORE title and end-card lockup as graphic overlays, and a licensed club track under the sound design. The world and the cut are done; the finish is the last mile, same as the rest of the studio.