Only 7 Hours to Save a Year of Work (So I Went to Sleep?!)

The problem: The Dokibird video was BORING.

Worse than boring. It was fine.

After a year of work, hundreds of hours, and endless revisions, this final video we'd created was competently... okay.

A life-size tomato, 360 no-scopes, and ten microwaves all somehow rendered into a final product that was undeniably… mid.

And it was going live on Doki's channel in twelve hours. Staring at the screen at 4am, eyes bloodshot with lack of sleep, I had a choice.

1) Release the video as is. It had its moments. It was... fine. Call it done.

Or...

2) Rewrite everything. New script. New voiceovers. New edit. Transform it completely without a single frame of new footage. In less than twelve hours.

A case of energy drinks, cool and crisp, lurked in my fridge. Waiting. I could chug enough caffeine to drop a horse, ride the jittery energy and hope it wired me up and somehow pull my sluggish brain into a miracle...

But... No. I knew that caffeinated writing creates frantic, disconnected scenes that feel clever during those sleepless nights, and inevitably reveal themselves as garbage by morning. The exhaustion sat heavy on my shoulders, and my eyes were blurry with that specific 4am ache. I knew I wouldn't make it if I pushed through. I'd just string together janky dialogue, force connections that didn't exist, and deliver voice acting that had all the urgency of a wet blanket.

There was only one option. At 4am, with launch day breathing down our necks, with a year's worth of work rendered into mediocrity, and the deadline barreling down on us in just 12 hours...

I made the only decision that made sense.

I went to sleep.

The weight of the project pressed down on me as I dragged myself into bed. Just a week ago, the warehouse thermometer had hit 110°F during filming. Not the dry heat of a desert like it normally was in Vacaville, but a humid, exhausting weight in the sealed box of our set. Between takes, I'd wipe the sweat off my face, wondering if anyone would even watch this thing we'd been building for so long. It’d been almost a year since we started this project.

I’d become incredibly familiar with Doki’s laughter now, through the hundreds of hours of vods I’d watched, through the countless of hours of research, all the while writing the scripts and hammering out the concept of the campaign.

We’re not ones to half ass something at Vite, after all. No, we’d built everything from the ground up, iterating on designs and cycling through manufacturers to match Doki’s aesthetic and lore, drawing design after design after design. Every episode was built to serve both the story, chock full of references and lore, and meant to reveal each product we made in a wild, memorable way.

For episode 1, we focused in on Doki’s love for ancient Chinese culture, like Three Kingdoms, as well as her fondness for Stephen Chow films like Kung Fu Hustle, including a version of the axe dance and the closest music we could find to that original song. We staged the initial setup of the fight scene to look like a fighting game, with a line of “I just want to hold you,” as a nod to the purpose of chopsticks holding objects... and Doki’s penchant for grabs and throws in fighting games, plus other references, like her lack of utensils when she moved.

We'd written carefully. Revised endlessly. Draft after draft piling up, polishing, checking for inconsistencies, seeding tension and character motivations all tied to Doki’s journey in a new interpretation. Honor her story without retelling it. But between the stunts, between costume changes, between takes where we dumped cold water from iceboxes onto our faces, a question kept surfacing.

Was this something people would actually watch, or were we just throwing empty references at the wall?

The concept had started simple enough. We’d been Doki fans for a while, and we knew that she loved bento boxes, but the kitchen may as well be outside the ring as far as she was concerned. The microwave was supposedly the only cooking implement she was familiar with.

Budget constraints and the need for actual cooking skills made it so that in these videos, I would have to be the only other actor. Each episode needed a proper kitchenware demonstration, and my Michelin Star background meant I could handle knives with over the top performances without fearing a trip to the ER.

Chef and ingredient. That's the core relationship, right? One cuts, one gets cut. One cooks, one gets cooked. And with Dokibird's lore of being sentient tomato... The focus on knife and tomato seemed inevitable.

But, we asked ourselves, what if she wasn’t the only one? What if there were more tomatoes, representing paths not taken, other things that might’ve happened if Doki weren’t, well, Doki?

And so that’s what we settled on, creating a world with life-size talking tomatoes and microwave cooks with amnesia and surreal giant Dokibirds and life-size tomatoes and 360 noscopes and martial arts and talking cutting boards and three tomatoes with representing metaphorical different creator paths and the philosophical definition of absurdism via Camus and existential weight of unfulfilled potential and--

I woke with a jolt at 8:28 a.m, two minutes before my alarm. My eyes burned, a knot in my right shoulder was already seizing up, but the sleep had cleared the fog. I knew what was wrong with the video.

See, even the first episodes we made had gone through some last minute changes and edits to improve them. Episode 2, for instance, was supposed to be simpler, a composite of live-action and 3D animation, but when our 3D animator got to it... he locked in, and got inspired.

Instead of just a static spotlight and me phasing in and out of existence behind the tomato, he created a surreal stage, where the tomato’s memories and beliefs were cross examined.

Giant figures of Dokibird and a Dragoon would grow out of the ground, looming behind the Tomato and symbolizing the pressure of the paths he felt he’d failed to live up to. Dragoons would fly across with the kind of freedom the tomato never took advantage of. We even had Tim's personas age, their hair turning from black to grey to white, mirroring the tomato’s decay as the mold set in, culminating in a feverish dream sequence that emphasized just how driven by fear our tomato was.

It was weird. It was direct. And... it planted the seeds of what we should’ve already known in storytelling.

Episode 1 actually already contained plenty of that secret ingredient. We’d just shown it in a different way, with a stage set, with martial arts and stunts, a physical manifestation of this ingredient.

Funnily enough, the weekend before, I’d gone to see the new Superman movie. And in that movie, they’d done the usual thing of opening in media res, opening with flashy fights... but the second big scene they did was even more gripping, and fundamentally, more risky.

The second big scene that they did... was a talking scene. A fight, a conflict... but through words, a back and forth of belief, attacks and counters, a verbal spar with heightened emotions and hurt and confusion and distress.

And it was amazing.

See, the hero video wasn’t the first one I rewrote either.

The original script of episode 3 had the tomato being cross-examined by the microwave cook, just like episode 2, and felt like it was treading the same ground. It was mostly showing the bento boxes being made, and the metaphors contained in the cooking, plating, and selection of the recipes that represented the backstory of the tomato. The irony was that I was solving for a different problem here, finding new information that would be engaging, but ended up with the same solution I’d end up using for the main video.

I made them fight.

The tomato and microwave cook bristled at each outer, calling each other out on their failures. "Always third" became an accusation, not an observation, and the tomato didn’t sit there and take it. No, the tomato threw the cook’s kitchen fire back in his face, giving it just as good as he got, the two of them interrupting each other over and over. And all while that argument raged, the bentos were telling their own story through the visuals. We designed each one to represent a facet of the tomato’s past:

"The Three Tomatoes" - Three compartments showing three different fates. Dokibird as an onigiri with cherry tomato on top, umami tomato reduction and tamagoyaki hair. Our tomato skinned, hollowed out and stuffed with seasoned ground pork, a foreshadowing of his eventual fate, and Frank, perfectly formed, then crushed and punched down.

"Raw Courage" - Split down the middle, the left side with a crudité of raw vegetables, unproven and unprepared, and the right side with the same vegetables, seasoned and cooked in a beautiful Asian-American ratatouille. The same can be read in one, or as separate words.

"Dreaming of Laughter" - A sleeping Dragoon onigiri tucked in bed, with "ha ha" cut out in basil on top of diced tomato. This was the dream the tomato had been chasing-- Doki's saying of "let's keep laughing together”... but he'd been sleeping on it instead of living it.

"The Ticking Clock" - Rice shaped into a clock face with nori hands at 11:50, where we see the decay of food as the time moves onwards. Fresh cherry tomatoes at 12, pickled at 3, sundried at 6, powder at 9, and the same with salmon going from sashimi to cooked to lox to dehydrated salmon furikake.

I’d originally thought this 3rd episode would be the lowest views, lowest engagement. It was, after all, primarily building bentos, and was less dramatic and visually engaging than, say, episode 1, with the full costumes and martial arts and sets. But I was so, so wrong.

See, we'd built philosophy when people wanted feelings. Contemplations when we needed conflict. One sided attacks when we needed a pitched battle. The 3rd episode, despite being the most visually simple, ended up with the highest watchthrough rate(69%! nice) instead.

But the final video was still a meditation. The tomato preaching philosophical acceptance instead of screaming the desperation and uncertainty of what he’d chosen, gently explaining knife design and the symbolism behind it all, listing out the careful thought behind each element... peacefully and quietly accepting his fate.

But a dying tomato that thinks its wasted its life doesn’t take things laying down. It doesn’t go quietly and sadly. It screams about wasted time. It makes demands. It tells you exactly how much you owe them for their sacrifice, justified or not in its desperation.

And so when I snapped awake, I had just hours to transform that quiet meditation into  a desperate fight, without any new footage. After all, the tomato wasn't just dying. It was dying as the worst of three options.

Another tomato from the same field as our tomato and Doki, Frank, transferred from the "Aura Farm,” and got squished believing its pedigree was enough. Thought that coming from the right place, having the right background, knowing the right people meant he didn't need to keep trying... and because of that, had to take whatever came his way, ending up against a dull knife and a squish.

Our tomato was the opposite-- had perfect form, endless preparation and training... but never felt ready, and never took action. Watched everyone else as while it perfected one more technique, one more day, never feeling quite ready, optimizing for a debut that never came.

But the last tomato... her path was about resilience. It was about transformation against the odds, from her being able to start again as a tomato fishing a skinsuit out of a dumpster, to her ability to inspire others with her distinct, unending laugh, and the saying anchored across all her profiles: "Let's keep laughing together". Even as we were deep in this project, we saw her live out this very philosophy during the Marvel Rivals tournament when she stepped back and trusted her teammates to win it all.

And for me, somewhere in those sleepless hours, it all clicked. That was the answer. That was the only way out for our tomato. Not quiet acceptance. But a final, desperate act of transformation... Not for himself, this time, but to create and support others, too.

I rolled out of bed at 8:29, just before my alarm rang. Just under 4 hours of sleep. It was enough. Even the smallest amount of sleep gives clarity, clears your head enough to push you towards where you needed to be. I booted up my computer, opened up Premiere, and posted on the company Discord.

“I could release as is

But.

BUT.”

And we were off, scrambling against the impossibly tight deadline I’d put on us. I started by putting the 360 no-scope at the very beginning, intercut with the introduction to the knife's iron sights, cutting out the original slower hook, while scanning the rest of the script to see where we could have the tomato and cook fight each other in this final, desperate moment.

We'd been so careful with the references, so precise with the choreography, so thoughtful with the meaning that we'd forgotten the most basic thing. People don't connect with ideas. They connect with feelings. And a dying tomato doesn't go quietly into the night-- it rages against the dying of the light.

Truth be told, the desperate fight against time the tomato felt... At that moment, I could empathize more than ever as I re-recorded the voiceovers just as fast as they were written, the rest of the Vite team helping where they could, suggesting lines, polishing animations, prepping everything to be ready to go by the quickly approaching launch window.

Tick tock, tick tock.

Cut philosophy explanation. Front-load the action. Let desperation drive the narrative, cut out the monologues. Back and forth, butting heads, progress, show the vulnerability, call back to the past episodes and conflicts--

Rendering...

Same footage. Same story. A completely different feeling.

Uploading...

A year of work. Hundreds of hours. One night of sleep. Hours of frantic rewriting, recording, and editing.

I slammed enter on my keyboard, sending the link off. Just in time. Well. Almost. Technically, I was 9 minutes late.

We waited nervously for it to go up on Doki’s channel. I needed food. I needed a shower. I needed to know if we'd made the right choice. We watched with bated breath as the first comments rolled in, watched the reactions, the comments, looked to see if the video would bomb, get stuck at just a few thousand views, never to be seen again.

I glanced at the clock. Minutes crawled agonizingly forward, each second stretched, warping my already strained sense of time. I began to doubt everything again. At the end of the day... this was still an ad. Still a commercial. That meant we had a severe and significant mountain to climb. Viewers would go in skeptical, know it was an ad, and view everything with a critical eye, being much, much happier to click away.

Comments began to fill the screen.

"This is the most epic way anybody has ever announced a kitchen knife drop."

The views weren't just crawling in.

“This might be top 5 commercials of all time LMFAO I FEEL LIKE I NEED THIS IN MY KITCHEN 🍅🍅🗡”

“I never expected to watch an emotionally gripping kitchen knife commercial where someone says, “Cut me open and wear my skin” yet here we are”

They were climbing faster than we could’ve ever hoped.

"This could be anime BUY BUY BUY 🥳."

Ten thousand views, then twenty thousand... thirty thousand views in just the first five hours.

I sank back into my chair, and a hot, deep exhale exited my lungs, like all the pent up stress and tension escaped my body all at once. The knot in my shoulder loosened slightly. I became keenly aware of just how long I’d been hunched over the screen.

But in that moment, with all the adrenaline draining off and my body beginning to scream at me for all the pain I’d caused it and all the rest it didn’t get, I couldn’t help but laugh, and laugh, nad laugh some more. The crazy decision day of, the year long journey, all the stress and pain and sleepless nights-- We’d done it. Our insane, frantic gamble had paid off. And on top of all of it, choosing those four hours of sleep had turned out to be the best play after all.

The comment section exploded further:

"Best ad ever take my money 💰💰💰💸❤️."

"Oh my god this is an ad of all time. Excellent job throughout, great production values. To the preorder I go!"

"best knife ad this year"

"Absolute cinema”

The warehouse filming days in blistering heat, the sleepless nights, endless script revisions, the weight of uncertainty, that final, sleepless rush... suddenly, it was all worth it.

We'd taken a huge risk... but it’d paid off. Exhausted yet buzzing, I finally staggered away from the screens. The hot shower washed away some of the lingering doubt, even though I knew I’d have to do all this again, and more, live, in just two days.

The last comment I saw before sending my computer off to sleep made me laugh: "That entire video was a fever dream... Wait, was it a fever dream? Am I okay?"

Yeah, I thought. It kind of was.

But y’know what?

I think we all made it out okay.

...I hope.

Watch the videos and pre-order the collection: https://viteramen.com/dokibird