Studio Liddell

Our good friends at AIS approached us with a really cool brief to help them bring Hemingway to life on the web. The TV commercials had been animated using puppets and taxidermy squirrels with armatures inside. For this project we would need to re-create an accurate Hemingway in CG. The project utilised some "blinking" clever code that detected a user's eye movements via their webcam. The object is to stare out Hemingway, but he's a cheeky chappy so he's going to try and put you off!

Our character team "scurried" into action creating a photo-real squirrel in 3D Studio Max, utilising the Hair Farm plug-in for the realistic fur simulation. The brief called for a series of animations that would potentially put people off when staring Hemingway out. We devised an animation sequence peppered with tail swishes, puffy cheeks, twitches and scratches that we hoped would do the trick. If the glassed eyed among us made it to the end your reward seeing Hemingway buckle first and blink then hang his head in shame.