The Mill have produced a fully animated commercial for Unilever fabric softener brand ?‚àö√ë‚àö‚â§Comfort’s. The brief for ?‚àö√ë‚àö‚â§Comfort Cr?¬¨√Üme’s, directed by freelance director Rachel Guidera for Ogilvy & Mather, was to take ?‚àö√ë‚àö‚â§Clothworld’s into a new direction of elegance and luxury.

To create the luxurious look for the singer, Laurent Makowski developed a library of satins/silks and velvet shaders. The decision was made to use ?‚àö√ë‚àö‚â§stitched together’s panels of satin for her hair, as the team felt that satin would enable the hair to have fluid movement and a lovely sheen. Silks were used for her body and diamantes and sequins were added to her dress and hair for a touch of sparkle.

The back-up singers provided The Mill with a perfect opportunity to inject some of the usual Clothworld character and humour. The team had great fun modeling the girls with their elaborate hairstyles and varied body shapes. Animator Julio Del Rio added amusing touches to their facial expressions and dance movements.

As the script was set in a classy lounge environment it enabled the team to push the lighting into a new direction. They were able to play with dramatic spotlights and atmospheric lighting. The location also meant they were also able to play around with the colour palette using rich creams and chocolate browns.

Part of the brief was to incorporate the Comfort Creme bottles into the singer performance. Director Rachel Guidera had a great idea that the elements should be part of an elaborate choreographed stage show, with the bottles pouring silky streams of Comfort Cr?¬¨√Üme and emitting fresh fragrant flowers as the singer hits the chorus line ‘Comfort me’.

The biggest challenge throughout the process would have been creating the cloth simulations for the silk stole. Rachel and Rob Van den Bragt tried many ways to simulate the soft/flowing movements of a stole. After many tests and tweaks they settled on using a mixture of Syflex and hand animated blend shapes to create the final result.

Another testing part of the project was achieving realistic movement for the singer hair. It needed to move in a fluid way and interact with her body ?Äì which creatively is not the easiest thing to control when you are working with individual panels of satin! Mill animator Cenay Oekman developed a hair system that, along with hand animation, allowed us to really control the movement of the hair for each shot.