Jeff Rocks Out
Three Ireland
Jeff, Three’s award-winning bearded dragon is back! Last seen whizzing around to Bonnie Tyler on the back of a robot vacuum cleaner, this time he’s perched on a speaker rocking out to Joan Jett’s ‘I Love Rock ’n’ Roll’.
Directed by Tomas Jonsgarden and Ponder, the campaign shines a light on Framestore’s exceptional creature and animation work, and builds on ‘Jeff’s World’ which took home a British Arrows, Bronze for Animation- CGI.
The Framestore team was led by VFX Supervisor Jules Janaud who delighted in working with our plucky hero again.
“Jeff’s a creature that can do extraordinary things, so it’s great to have the freedom where we can push the levels of photorealism, whilst being mindful of not taking it too far” he says.
“He’s the perfect example of where every major step of VFX meets at its highest point: animation, modelling, rigging, lookdev, CFX, lighting and compositing”.
The team used the original Jeff CG asset that Framestore had built for the first campaign, which was developed using a procedural scattering system in Houdini to build the base mesh of Jeff scaling details.
A key challenge was in the animation, and how to keep Jeff visually entertaining by being subtle and simple. “We wanted to feel that every action could have been shot for real whilst creating an interesting emotive build up through a short period of time” explains Jules.
With Jeff’s personality forming such an integral part of the campaign, another interesting challenge was the CFX, and how the skin and fat simulation on some very close up shots could bring out another layer of personality.
Jules adds: “It was a pleasure to reunite with Tomas Jonsgarden and bring Jeff to life again. I think we can all agree that he’s the star of the show, and I can’t wait to see what he gets up to next!”
The spot was graded by Jean-Clément Soret at Company 3.
Check out the case study for ‘Jeff’s World’ to read more about how Framestore crafted Jeff.
