"Duckling is a small VFX boutique that offers visual effects, editing, color grading, project coordination, commercial versioning and mastering. We do high profile work for national and international clients and directors. We don't have a long track record in realistic character animation but, as we always do, we wanted to do our very best and make this commercial both believable and entertaining. Our main goal was to avoid it being cartoonish." Jonas Drehn

At the start of the project Duckling didn't have creature modeling/rigging resources in house so it was outsourced to London. That’s where Grant Walker took the character from reference footage to the final fully rigged squirrel. The model was pretty lowers polygon geometry based on loads of squirrel footage with only a color map applied and the rig was a The Setup Machine rig with loads of small tweaks and adjustments. In the beginning we considered using a muscle setup but quickly decided to skip that idea since we didn't think it would make a difference on this spot.

Animation by Soeren Cornelius and Jakob Welner

The first phase of the animation process was to fine tune the rig to satisfy the two animators. As the modeling and rigging was outsourced, this included a lot of e-mailing back and forth. Meanwhile, the rig was being developed, loads of squirrel reference footage was being shot and as soon as the rig had the basic setup in place, both animators started doing test animations to get into the motion pattern of a squirrel.Since we had two animators on the project and only one shot, we split the previz in two. We focused on a pose where the squirrel was as still as possible and started animating then in two different scenes split somewhere in the middle.The actual animation process was pretty much up to each animator to decide, which ended up with the first half being done pretty much straight ahead and the second half being more of a pose by pose approach. Due to the one shot split, we had to continuously transfer animation and poses between the two scenes to match up the translation. As for the client comments, everything went pretty smooth and nothing big had to be redone from scratch, which helped a lot or at least didn't ruin anything.

Since compositing wasn't needed to show the animation progress to the client, I was assigned to the project as compositor pretty late in the process. They were well aware of the fact that what they saw in the previews didn't represent the final look. At the time I came onboard the animation was almost done and the fur creation was in its final stage. This made my life a lot easier since there was no need to redo the same shot from a different angle, framing or lighting. I knew what I pretty much could expect to get from the 3D guys in the end, and by that I could set up my script to be easily adjustable with fast results.

When filming the scene on set we brought in a real stuffed squirrel and took a lot of photos of it for later reference. Those reference photos became an essential part in making the compositing of the animated squirrel look as photo-real as possible. In order to get the final look we wanted it was important for me to work closely with Peter Szewczyk, who created the fur, shading and rendering while I did the compositing. I had suggestions to which passes I would like to get from him, and he would tell me which ones were possible in the short amount of time we had to render. I believe I ended up getting 20 passes in total and ended up using around 15 of those. The director was very keen on giving the scene a kind of flat look, which meant that many of the minor details in the fur would eventually be lost at times. But I believe that in the end it was the right decision to make it blend in with the concept.

Since I had a lot of reference photos and many passes to work with, it was a pretty straight forward composite and it was completed ahead of schedule. This meant that little details like transparency of the bottle, movement of the bottle cap and defocus/camerashake could be added in time. The client only had a few comments about the composite and those were easily done. All compositing was done using Apple’s Shake.