Telling a Local Bottler's Story: Behind the Scenes of Our Orangeburg Coca-Cola Brand Film
- Jonathan Palance
- May 23
- 3 min read
When Timothy & Sinclair brought us in to make a brand film for the Orangeburg Coca-Cola Bottling Company, the assignment came with a deadline and a destination — a finals slot at a national Coca-Cola corporate competition. They had three minutes to tell the story
of a small-city bottler that knows every grocery clerk and gas station owner by name. (We've been wanting to do something with our friend William Mitchell over at Timothy & Sinclair for years, so getting to it finally felt fantastic.)
The competition is one Coca-Cola judges every year — where bottlers from all over the country submit short films and compete on craft and emotion. Spoiler: they didn't win. But my client was told that the Orangeburg film was the best video in the room (swoon). We'll take that.
The Story We Were Chasing
The hook was a simple one: what does it actually look like when a local bottler cares about the businesses they serve? Not "we care" over the phone or behind an email — care as in they know your name when you walk in the door. So we built the film around that. We went to Orangeburg, we went to the bottling plant, and we filmed with three people whose lives intersect with that operation every week — somebody inside the bottling plant, the owner of a local grocery store, and a woman who works at one of the local gas stations.
Every one of them said some version of the same thing — they know us, we know them, we look out for each other. "Family" was the word that kept coming up, unprompted, in every interview. It wrote itself, really.
A Detail You Could Not Have Scripted
Walking through one of the stores with our cameras, we noticed something the client probably didn't plan on us catching: the Coke products were fully stocked, edge to edge. The Pepsi shelves? Lacking. Time to roll camera on that.
That's the thing about a story like this — when the work is real, the visuals confirm it for you. We didn't need a graphic. We didn't need a stat. The beverages did all the talking.
Shooting in a Live, Working Store
Every shoot has a footprint, and the footprint of a "simple" three-light interview setup is bigger than non-production people expect. Two cameras for the interview. Two tripods. A key light on a stand, a fill, sometimes an overhead boom. Plus the chair, plus the human in the chair, plus us. We block aisles even when we're trying not to.
The grocery store and the convenience store stayed fully open while we were filming. Customers were still coming in to grab milk, eggs and sodas. And then there we were, standing right in front of the stuff they needed. We basically became store clerks for a bit.
It wasn't elegant, but it was real... and that's perfect.
Why It Worked
On paper, this story wasn't supposed to be the dramatic one. No big swings, no heart-tugging twist. When you talk to enough people about what they do, you find the line that connects everything: in this case, it was the fact that knowing someone's name changes the service you give them. That's the whole brand, in one sentence. The team at Timothy & Sinclair and the Orangeburg Coca-Cola Bottling Company are the kind of clients we want more of — clear on their story, trusting with the camera, generous with the people we needed to talk to.
If you're a brand that needs a short, human, character-driven film — not a slick agency reel, but the kind of thing your customers actually feel — that's the work we love doing at Soda City Films. Drop us a line.
Comments