Old Spice – Curls Are Cool

I designed, animated and composited this cutesy cereal mascot for an Old Spice advert. My little boy is called, Crispo.

The agency wanted the character to have a lots of gradients and defined curly locks. Thankfully, the motion was either very fast or quite still. So, I was able to get away with deforming the still hair artwork rather than hand draw every curl.

The compositing was the trickiest bit. The hero character walks right across the screen, the camera’s moving, the camera lens distorted the perspective, and every box was at a slightly different angle. That left almost no automatic tracking points. A lot of frame by frame nudging was done to make it as solid as possible.

Another tricky job was handling the jump from Crispo being tracked on a flat surface in 3D space to being frame by frame on top of the footage. To help with this I did a really rough 3D animation with a cut out of the character and the spoon. I was surprised by how good the spoon image translated into 3D straight away.

The milk was then all drawn frame by frame, which would be a nightmare for most, but I find it quite therapeutically hypnotic to do. Half of it was at 25fps. That was less therapeutic.

Watch the full advert here: