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Collaborating with M&C Saatchi, The Mill worked to bring their new ad for Blue Cross to life by creating over 100 photo-real CG animals to advertise Blue Cross’ initiative of supporting abandoned pets across the UK.

The soul stirring spot, directed by Outsider’s directing duo Dom & Nic, sees an abandoned dog take to the streets in search of a new, loving owner, picking up a host of different furry friends on the way whilst singing a sombre rendition of Gloria Gaynor’s ‘I Will Survive’.

The Mill’s team of VFX artists created a CG dog mouth to replace that of the protagonist’s, who is voiced by Welsh actor Ryhs Ifan, as well as meticulously crafting scores of 100% CG animals, drawing from their extensive knowledge of creating photo-real creatures.

Executive Creative Director at The Mill Neil Davies comments, “Our approach was to keep our loveable dog Baxter’s performance within the realms of what a dog could physically do, taking a subtle approach to match the tone of delivery.

Using The Mill’s creature pipeline, which has been fine-tuned over recent stand out spots for PETA and SSE, we replaced most of the dog’s muzzle and face with a painstakingly matched animated CG version. Baxter’s “straggly” hair look needed bespoke grooming, plus the animation team did a great job with getting the performance to be believable without becoming at all human.

We also created over 100 fully CG animals. Drawing on our rich CG character experience cats, rabbits, hamsters and guinea pigs were added to the live action dogs to bring the journey to life. The line up shot near the end for example, was a huge compositing number combining 20 separate plates of real dogs with around 30 fully CG cats, rabbits etc.

I’m really proud of the finished spot, it was a pleasure to work on and hopefully once the viewers have dried their eyes it will do some good for a worthy cause as well.”