dom&nic have directed Kerry LowLow’s latest commercial ‘Mouse,’ a spot illustrating how far a mouse will go for a nibble of cheese on toast.  The commercial exhorts the irresistible flavour of their low fat cheese with an acrobatic super stunt mouse defying thousands of mouse traps.  The spot was produced by Jo Charlesworth at Fallon and John Madsen at Outsider, with MPC creating the fully CG mouse and 50,000 traps.  MPC’s proprietary tools played a vital role on the successful development on the spot and the Nuke Compositing system brought it all together.

In the word of Directors dom&nic; ‘The Kerry low mouse was an 'ultimate test' of 3D CGI and MPC to create a convincing photorealistic mouse in a story of two parts. In the first part the mouse had to feel very naturalistic, instinctive and cautious as it attempted to pass through the thousands of traps while in the second part the mouse had to become an acrobatic super stunt-mouse, jumping spinning and avoiding death by the closest margin. We gave the 3D team a real mouse as a pet to get them inspired and a couple of wooden traps and after 3 months of hard work and creative collaboration they gave us screen magic! Throughout the project the team at MPC did such great work it is hard to tell what's in camera and what is 3D.’

The job started with a pet mouse arriving at MPC and becoming part of the 3D team for a few weeks.  The mouse helped the artists develop the look of Kerry LowLow’s CG hero and to familiarise them with rodent movements and facial expressions.  Reference pictures were taken during the shoot and used as the base of the soon to be created perilous stunt.  The team led by Jake Mengers animated the hero character retaining a realistic look for the first part of the commercial before his transformation to stunt mouse for the second half.  All of this whilst retaining the realism of the piece.  Maya was used for animation with in-house tool ‘Furtility’ grooming the fur and Renderman and Tickle for the rendering.

One of the main technical challenges was animating the thousands and thousands of CG mouse traps seen snapping and colliding with each other in each shot.  To achieve this physics based ‘domino effect,’ Ashley Bernes wrote a series of event based simulation scripts to automate the traps snapping behaviour based on incoming collisions.  This worked together with another of MPC’s in-house tools, PAPI to create the action shot.

The 2D team – led by Stephen Newbold – worked with Nuke which allowed them to composite the 3D heavy shots in a time efficient way.  With the directors wanting control over all camera moves in post, Nuke was fundamental.  It permits working with huge resolutions – some shots in this job are over 8k - and enables the virtual 2D camera moves which zoom right into the mouse.  The CG mouse and traps were all composited and graded in a linear workspace using multiple passes.  Extensive clean-up and floor replacements was also carried out.  This is MPC’s first project done exclusively in Nuke.

Jean Clement Soret added the master grade on Resolve working from scanned 35 mm to enhance the spot.

The spot will be on air in the UK from 14th October 2009.

Watch VFX Breakdown