Robinsons meets Gravity (Oscar-winning film) with the launch of their new product, SQUASH'D

The event...

Last Friday I was lucky enough to attend the launch of Robinsons' new product, SQUASH'D at the Soho Hotel in London. I arrived in probably the most modern and creative hotel that I've ever been to and was lead down to a reception full of journalists, writers and bloggers. On tables dotted around the room there were capsules of Robinsons' SQUASH'D ready for you to try. After trying the drink and milling around  meeting the various other people in the room, the real event began. 

We were led into a room full of the most amazing armchairs and sofas I've ever seen in my entire life.  (Probably seems like an irrelevant, but they were seriously cool.) The screening room was dotted with red leather and cow skin seats in a seemingly random order that somehow just ... worked. Once everyone was comfy, the lights began to dim.


First, a representative of Britvic gave a brief introduction as to why we were there and what the new product is and then she welcomed Mike McGee, co-founder and creative director of Framestore, to the podium. Now why would these two people be working together, you ask? Well, the Robinsons teamed wanted to think of the most outrageous place to make their new squash drink and having just seen the film Gravity, they thought, why not space?

So, the award-winning British visual effects team behind his year's biggest blockbuster, Gravity, accepted the challenge to make Robinsons SQUASH'D in space. Of course, actually going up into space in impossible, but they were able to create zero-gravity conditions in which to carry out this task. It's actually possible to go on plane journeys that allow you to experience zero gravity. Essentially, a plane shoots up into the sky really fast and then plummets back down again, but during the brig 15 seconds when the plane is making a parabola in the sky, you can experience zero gravity. This is where Robinsons and Framestore decided to create their new advert.  Sounds simple enough, but try bringing a camera crew into zero gravity to film an advert for a drink and things get a little tricky (and probably sticky with all that squash flying everywhere).

The plane  was only allowed to make 12 loops and the advert was filmed in the twelfth loop so thank God for that!  The bloopers video for this mission was shown and it was pretty damn hilarious; there was water flying everywhere, squash being squirted everywhere, camera's being pointed left right but never centre. Eight crew members were sent up in the plane and they had only three minutes of weightlessness in total to film the squash being made. Over four litres of water were used and sixty capsules of SQUASH'D were taken onto the flight. Sounds like it was a disaster, but in the end, the team at Framestore did a pretty damn good job and here's the result: 

Things I learnt about Gravity... 

As well as discussing the making of this new advert, Mike McGee also gave us an insight into the making of Gravity, which took almost four years. What most people don't know, is that this film is actually about 90% CGI and only 10% real. A lot of the filming process was simply Sandra Bullock and George Clooney in a big white box with only their faces being filmed. The body movements of them in the spacesuits was often all computer generated. Amazing stuff right?

I haven't seen the film myself but I've heard that Sandra Bullock does a lot of spinning off into space, so much so that the audience started to feel ill just watching her after a while. Instead of Sandra Bullock being spun round and round on a wire, they created a device so that the camera could spin round and round instead. An incredibly amount of time and effort went into making this film look as realistic as possible. The couldn't simply have the actors being filmed upside down to simulate zero gravity because there was an immediate change in face colour and it was quite obvious from the way their features were positioned that they were upside down, thus, under the influence of gravity, which defeats the point of the film. 

How does it work?