Steampunk Coke

Diploma film at Fachhochschule Dortmund — and at the same time, an attempt not to tell advertising like advertising, but like a small adventure.

The sixty-second spec spot for Coca-Cola moves a simple plot into a fully mechanised steampunk world of brass, gears, compressed air, steam pipes and old ticket systems. A single bottle of Coke is not simply transported — it travels. Through pipes, rails, levers, valves and half-forgotten machine rooms, as if a small reality of its own existed somewhere between Jules Verne, an industrial railway station and fairground mechanics.

The film was made not only as a practical graduation piece, but at the same time as part of an extensive academic thesis titled "Cinematic miniatures and narrative strategies — a film analysis through a spec spot".

The theoretical work combines classical film analysis with the psychology of perception, image composition, steampunk iconography and the dramaturgy of advertising films. Many design decisions of the film — the rust-red colour world, the mechanical movement patterns, the deliberately exaggerated machine logic, or the almost cartoon-like physics of individual moments — were not just built intuitively but also reflected and analysed academically.

In the end, Steampunk Coke became more than just a spec spot: a mixture of commercial film, cinematic play and a theoretical inquiry into why short audiovisual formats sometimes stay in memory longer than entire feature films.

For Max Tsui, Steampunk Coke became an important turning point. For the first time, the film brought together many of the things that would later shape his work: cinematic advertising, atmospheric worldbuilding, precisely controlled camera movement, and the idea of letting even the smallest formats feel emotionally larger than they actually are.

In 2015 the film received international recognition — among others with the CFP-E/shots Young Director Award (Test Commercial Europe), the Gold ANDY Award New York, ADC Deutschland Junior, and a nomination for the Michael-Ballhaus-Preis at the First Steps Award.