We were requested to make a sunny commercial for a safari bungalow park part of a zoo with a squirrel gathering different kind of animals. At the time we recieved this briefing it was snowing outside and the whole bungalow park was still under construction… So the only option was to shoot in the studio where we recreated one (complete) bungalow with a patch of forest around it.
Since shooting with 4 different kind of animals was out of the question we had to rely on a CGI squirrel and stock footage for the requested giraffe, zebra and lion. We choose our stock footage of the animals carefully to suggest interation between them and the CGI squirrel.
We shot layers upon layers of foilage and branches to create as much depth as we could. Since we had to add the squirrel afterwards we shot all the shots in passes, usually back, mid and foreground. In the shots were there’s interaction between the squirrel and the foilage we used compressed air to suggest movement.
Since a very well organised offline wins you tons of time in the online I approached the ofline edit as the online conform. So every piece of background, branch, positions, scalings, animations was accounted for. In the comping phase I relighted all the material to blend footage together and add depth.
