3D cat in the advertisement of the real estate company

Indoors this time: another spot for the same real estate advertiser puts the CG cat in a kitchen, up on its hind legs at the table beside a live actor mid-breakfast. Character animation, fur, lighting and compositing into the filmed footage are the disciplines on show, and Terminal FX’s animation and visual effects for the piece belong to our commercial and advertising portfolio.

Sharing a frame with a performer raises the bar. The digital animal has to sit in the same warm interior light as the actor, pick up bounce from the walls and cast shadows into a real room, which means rebuilding the set lighting in CG closely enough that the two exposures agree. The camera move has to be tracked so the cat stays locked to the surface it stands on, props and set dressing in front of it have to be rotoscoped, and any object it touches needs a clean cleanup pass. Timing matters as much as pixels — the cat’s beats have to land against a performance that was shot without it. Comedy in a commercial only survives if the integration is invisible, and that is the standard our compositing and animation work is held to.