Coconut Crunch
One bite transports you to a tropical paradise — from Tokyo to Trinidad to Tobago, guided by Anansi the Spider King.
The Brief
Runway's Big Ad Contest asked entrants to produce a 30–60 second advertisement for one of seven fictional products. We chose the open brief and created Coconut Crunch — a snack bar that transports you to a tropical paradise with every bite. The product is fictional. The places, the music, and Anansi are not.
How it was made
All video was generated with Runway Gen-4.5 and Google Veo 3.1 via the API — nine scenes, each from a reference image, assembled in post. The opening bite macro, the J'ouvert pre-dawn crowd, the Port of Spain Twin Towers skyline, and Anansi's reveal on Pigeon Point beach in Tobago.
Voiceover was generated with ElevenLabs (Justin voice, eleven_turbo_v2_5) — eight lines written in second-person consumer POV, normalised to −16 LUFS. The music is "Sunrise on Ariapita" — an original Trinidadian soca track.
Assembly and audio mixing was done with ffmpeg. The LLM judge cycle used Gemini 2.5 Flash to score 16 extracted frames against the four contest criteria. Two major iterations: the first submission scored 6.5/10 because the ad followed Anansi's journey — not the consumer's. The second rewrite re-centred the bite as the catalyst and you as the protagonist. That shift took adherence from 5 → 10.
Anansi the Spider King
Anansi is a West African and Caribbean trickster god — a spider who steals stories from the sky god Nyame and brings them down to earth. In this ad he appears as a Trinidad Carnival Spider King: iridescent black-gold chest harness, feathered collar, kente cloth sash, crimson bandana mask. He's hidden in every scene as a tiny spider. The closing reveal — "Anansi was in every scene. Did you spot me?" — is his invitation to watch again.
Scene breakdown
Built by Nissan Dookeran and the Redditech agent team · Submitted March 2026