A dancing chick. What could possibly be more cute? This is Asda’s brand ad for their 2014 Easter campaign. Director Christian Bevilacqua didn’t want this to be another CG dancing animal advert so we created this spot using real baby chicks. The little chicks were placed on strips of cardboard and gently moved around to seem like they were dancing. The cardboard rig was then removed in Flame by reconstructing the floors and walls that they obscured. This required camera tracking the shot environment and re-projecting painted clean backgrounds. The chicks were then rotoscoped back over the cleaned up set. We also reconstructed parts of the chick’s legs that had been obscured by the cardboard rig. Shadows of the dancing chicks were then recreated and projected back onto the reconstructed environment. There was no CGI, no puppets, no robots and no glue used in the making of this commercial. Although the chicks were unharmed during the making of the ad, somebody did tell me that they were fed to a snake after filming. Maybe they were joking. You can see a breakdown of the VFX work on this page here.