Commercial for Zhivinka yogurt

Zhivinka is Danone’s Ukrainian yogurt range, and its commercial hands the storytelling to CG characters: pieces of fruit given eyes, limbs and a bit of attitude, animated into a live-action domestic setting alongside product visualization, food and liquid simulation and compositing.

Animated brand characters are harder to pull off than they look. A strawberry with a face still has to look like a strawberry — the same translucency, seed detail and soft skin as the real fruit — while carrying a performance that reads in a couple of seconds of screen time. Then it has to belong to the room it is standing in: matched key and bounce light, contact shadows on the surface underneath, motion blur and defocus that agree with the lens, and roto and cleanup wherever the character crosses in front of something practical. Appetising realism and cartoon appeal pull in opposite directions, and holding both at once is exactly what the spot asks for. It is the kind of character animation Terminal FX builds for advertising clients.