FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION.(Realise Studio character creation)(Company Business and Marketing)

A CG character's facial animation speaks for itself

In an ongoing series of UK television commercials for First Direct Bank, a quirky 3D character doesn't just steal the show--he is the show. Voiced by English comedian Harry Hill, the odd little fellow mills about within a black void, grumbling about every aspect of daily life. His dialog is short and to the point--in one instance, he repeats an emphatic "No!" a dozen times before suddenly changing his mantra to "Oh, alright then; I'll meet you halfway." Getting through the day frustrates him, but his banking does not.

In these minimalist spots, there are no backgrounds or scene elements to carry the piece along, just the black-and-white underlit textured character. While his outward appearance lacks color, he makes up for it with a range of facial and body expressions that run the gamut from ecstatic to downcast, from quizzical to disinterested, all in a single commercial.

"We're trying to attract the audience through a generic character and nothing else, which is unusual for a commercial and extremely bold for a bank commercial," says Stuart Gordon, director and co-owner of Realise Studio in London, which created the peculiar but likable character. "We knew that this spot would live or die depending on how well we could make the little fellow perform. Although simple-looking, the character has a tremendous amount of embedded complexity that enables him to pull off his dramatic acting performances."

A Head Divided

Creating the character began with the creation of a clay sculpture of the chap's head, which was then laser-scanned. Next, Gordon squashed and stretched the scanned data inside Side Effects Software's Houdini until he achieved the desired look for the character--akin to the style used for the human characters in the feature film Toy Story 2.

According to Gordon, early in the project he and partner Paul Simpson realized that traditional CG techniques would have restricted their ability to achieve the character's wide capability of facial expressions. So they used a procedural methodology, developed by Gordon christened "shrink-wrap sculpting," which divided the head template data and automatically rebuilt it into individual mesh components. This process enabled the animators to apply complex and sophisticated animation controls easily.