Mill+ Gives PETA a '98% Humanull Performance

Mill+ Gives PETA a '98% Human' Performance

We're all used to special effects conjuring up magical lands and fantastical situations, but it's when the computer wizards and digital artists have to create an image of familiarity that we really see the caliber of their skills. In the creation of the simian protagonist of their Gold Film Craft Cannes Lions winning film '98% Human' for PETA, The Mill pulled out all the stops to ensure a believable performance was fashioned from the 1s and 0s.


A project from the Mill+ department of The Mill, the Design and Animation Studio formed with the company's support, '98% Human' was a tall order from day one – create a lifelike and believable ape-performer for a very serious cause. However, the results were sublime, with the character's convincing motions and empathetic expressions putting forward the requisite emotive clout, affecting viewers in the desired way.

We sat down to chat with Mill+ Animation Director Angus Kneale and the Lead 3D Artist Vince Baertsoen about how you imbue a digital ape with life.

The PETA work is a remarkable achievement. How did you get involved in the project?

Angus: We were approached nearly two yrs ago by BBDO. They had seen a lot of our CGI creature and animal work we had been doing and wanted to know if we would like to get involved with this project.

At the time it was incredibly ambitious and it was something we never had done before, so we knew we wanted be part of it.

What was the brief to you guys? What was the most essential thing to achieve?

Angus: The brief to us was to create a chimpanzee that was 100 percent believable and indiscernible to the real thing. The agency had a powerful message that they wanted to deliver and for that reason, the most essential thing to achieve was an emotional connection with the audience. We needed to create something that got under the audiences skin and made them feel uncomfortable. We really wanted to produce something that would help change the industry.

What did you use as reference materials? Was there any performance capture involved?

Angus: We decided to approach the project and craft everything by hand. With no access to a chimpanzee, we weren't able to make casts, we didn't use any type of motion or facial motion capture, we didn't use chimpanzee fur for reference. To make the chimpanzee look as genuine as possible, we used a lot of documentaries and reference videos and anatomy books.

What's the key factor to bringing a piece like this to life?

Angus: Detail was the key factor. There was no such thing as too much detail. The more we added the more authentic it felt. Something else we had to be very aware of was not to fall into the trap of animating the chimpanzee like a human. It was essential to stay true to the motion of a chimpanzee which is incredibly different to that of human. The details in the eyes and hands were the two areas that needed extra attention. We got to a pretty good place on the fur, the lighting and the skin but finding the emotion in the eyes was probably the hardest thing of all.

The photo-realistic nature of the animation is essential for the piece to work in context. How much of that is technology (i.e. realistic textures and lighting) and how much comes from the manipulation from your animators?

Vince: The combination of technology and talent is what really make this spot work, and all in a commercial schedule.

Obviously the cg artists mainly drove the emotion and the look of the chimpanzee: just half a blink of an eye, the lips pinching, a subtle reflection in the eyes and the ape would come to life.
But the tools gave us the ability to have an extra layer of details, we couldn't animate by hand, like muscles, skin tension, wrinkles or hair interaction, which helped us drastically feeling the chimpanzee alive.

Would a photo-realistic spot like this have been achievable 10 years ago? What's changed?

Vince: It would have been impossible to deliver something like this in such a short amount of time.
3D software and computers have become more powerful, but what's really changed is the possibility to program tools in a more intuitive ways.

Nodal base programming (like ICE) is definitely changing the way we work and open up new horizons, blending the line between technical and creative people.

Do you feel added responsibility when creating work for charities like PETA?

Vince: Especially on a project like PETA, as The Mill had a direct influence on saving animals life.
Our work had to be convincing, and i am glad to hear people now, telling me they couldn't realized it was a CG chimpanzee.
It was extra pressure but we are very proud of what we managed to achieve for such a great cause.

It's obvious that part of the purpose of the spot to showcase how CG can be used instead of trained animals. Is this kind of work something you're used to doing?

Vince: We have been doing more and more creature work in the last few years, and we always been pushing the quality.

But with PETA, we had to raise the bar really high and in term of details we never gone this far.

What's up next?

Vince: Now we have done a chimpanzee, we want to carry on doing more photo realistic creature and animals, and work on even more challenging projects.

Posted on 25th June