Killer Coke

Lesson 2 // Killer Coke by Mark Thomas 

Channel 4 dispatches Documentary, Killer Coke presented by Mark Thomas, was made to show the public the truth about Coca Cola and what really goes on behind closed doors. Whilst watching the 45 minute documentary we had to take down notes that proved multiple issues behind why Coca Cola  isn't as good as it may make itself out to be.  Below are the notes I took down - 

      General:- 

• 1.4 billion Cokes sold a day 
• Coca 'Cocaleaf' - Coccaine 
• Cocaine was removed from Coca Cola drink in the last century. 

      Germany & Coca Cola:-

• 1936 Nazi's 
• Coca Cola supported the 1936 Berlin Olympics
• When Coke ran out of syrup being used in Berlin, Germany created Fanta

      Discrimination:-

• Protests against Coca Cola all over in Atlanta
• Martin Luther King jr wanted a boycott against Coca Cola
• Martin Luther King jr thought against the fact that Coca Cola companies did not employ black people for normal working conditions but only for heavy manual labour and for much less pay. 

      India:-

• Local farmers protested of the large amounts of water usage Coca Cola wasted
• Protesters claimed it as though the water was being 'sucked dry' 
• 2 and a half litters of water was used to provide just 1 litre of Coke. 
• 20000 billion litres of water used around the world
• India protesters also claimed that parasites were found within the bottles of coke however coca cola fought against this accusation

      Death:-

• AUC Black Eagles killed nine people who were protesting against Coca Cola, one of which was killed one of Coca Cola's very own factories.
• In 2002 a man was also threatened whilst delivering coke - he asked for a job were he would be safe and not threatened by however Coca Cola did nothing. 
• A workers family was killed in 2004. 
• 179 human rights had been broken and nine was under Coca Cola's watch

      The Global Boycott began - 'Killer Coke'

     

      Latin America - El Savaldor:- 

• 330 ml of Coke contains 80tsp of sugar
• Coke Sugar supple comes from here
• Child Labour used to collect sugar Kane despite the fact that all workers should be over the age of 18. 
• $1.50 is earned per tonne of sugar cane collected which is why families bring there children (more sugar kane collected - more money) 
• 30000 children employed
• Workers try to hide that children are employed
• Coca cola says nine thousand children have been removed from working for coca cola 

      Coca Cola Factorys:- 

• Complaints about contaminating and polluting the water ignored.
• Bio Degradable waste in water due to the soap which is used to clean the bottles. 
• Dead fish found in the bottom of the lake and locals have complained they do not feel safe using the water as it cause rashes on the skin. 
• the river turns black due to all the chemicals. 

Using all the information, facts and stats collected from watching the documentary, we now have to create a poster for the boycott 'Killer Coke', Showing the truth behind coca cola, below are some examples of posters already made for the campaign...

My Killer Coke Campaign Poster

Rough Ideas - 

I initially had 4 ideas each of which showed different aspects from what we found out in the Killer Coke Documentary. Some of my ideas would show separate problems that surfaced and the others showed all different kind of things e.g the dirty water, the killer worker. I believe each idea effectively reached out to the audience in a different eye catching way. However I chose idea number 1...

..Reason for idea No.1 I chose idea number one firstly because it showed all different kind of problems that were shown throughout the documentary. I thought this would be a good way to reach out to people and show them the real truth instead of just one problem which may now be as effective. I decided to include, the killer coke protestors, to show people something can be and is being done as much as people can; the coke worker whom got shot, the reason I included this was because I believe most people wouldn't expect that killings would relate to coke however the poster and documentary prove this; the murky water in relation to the Coca Cola bottling factories polluting and finally the floating bodies in the glass of coke to shock the audience and really reach out to them. I also like idea 1 because of it relation to existing Coca Cola campaigns. I like the original posters with the coke bottle at the bottom at the ‘coke’ with images and patterns in bursting out from the bottle. It really caught my eye and I think that my poster could work in the same way. Just using the ‘bad’ image.

I wanted to base the poster on ‘cartoon’ images so that it was still hard hitting but wouldn’t be to tough to create and merge together. I started by finding a cartoon glass bottle of Coke that I could put at the bottom of the page. If you look at the rough idea I wanted to create the look of the ‘coke’ bursting out the bottle and I thought that this was the perfect image. All I had to alter was the logo, from ‘Coke’ to ‘Killer Coke’ I copied and pasted the middle part of the glass where the logo didn’t interfere and used the copied and pasted image to go over the writing and this gave the effect that nothing was there, I then used font website ‘dafont.com' to find the ‘Coke’ signature font and this allowed me to get write ‘Killer Coke’ where I wanted.

Secondly, I started to pile together my ideas. I began by putting in the protesters.  For the whole poster I wanted to use dark colours such as black and dark red, not only would this represent things like bad, evil, poison, death etc but the dark red would also represent coke and possibly blood.  Because of this I decided to to most of the images of people in silhouette. I found the perfect image on google of people protesting which also merged into the distance I thought this looked eye catching and also gave a ‘3D’ effect. I only had to alter the image using the magic wand tool to get rid of the white background and make it transparent and also resize the picture to fit to A4 and how I wanted it to look.

I managed to find cartoon images of a hand gun, silhouette of a person jumping or being shot which is what I wanted it to look like and dripping blood, which was a last minute addition which I thought looked powerful and also filled up white space. The only things I had to change with these components is changing the white background to transparent and adjusting the sizes to fit.

Finally I added the red/black murky river water to represent the polluted water, i think this really pulls the piece together and also gives a 3D effect. The glass of coke with the floating bodies, I used to fill up white space, which wouldn't of looked good with writing as I wanted something to fully fill up the blanks. I feel that the use of space looks direct and forceful. I altered the image by changing the white background into transparent using the magic wand tool so I could still see what was around it. The finishing touches were just to add in black paint to fill up the white spaces so the poster looked fully together. Below is my final outcome: