It’s starting to feel festive in our studios around the world, so we wanted to showcase some of the holiday commercials that have been created by our teams.
Starting with the British retailer Marks & Specer and their annual Christmas advert. The Mill’s team reunite with Fairy, voiced by iconic British actress/comedienne Dawn French. In the first part of this six-part blockbuster Fairy finds herself befriending two lovable and mischievous mittens, voiced by A-listers Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney, for their first taste of Christmas.
Read more about Fairy’s adventures here.
Picture this. CG farm animals showing off their catwalk capabilities dressed to the nines rocking to early noughties R&B classics. A dream? No, just TK Maxx’s unconventional Christmas advert! Featuring an alpaca sporting a crossbody bag, a pair of ducks rocking pearls, an elegant scarf and suave pink bow ties and of course a hedgehog in a cosy pink cashmere hat.
Read more about the story behind the advert and the challenges faced by the team when modelling human clothes to almost fit the animals.
The holidays are a time to recharge your batteries, and what better way to do so than by sitting back and enjoying a holiday commercial brought to you by Duracell. Mill+, the content & creative studio of The Mill, brings us the Duracell Bunny on a mission to rescue Santa from a Christmas power outage.
Read more about the advert and the longstanding relationship between The Mill & Duracell here.
Up next, is Amazon’s touching holiday campaign, depicting a love letter to deep friendships and childhood memories.
The Mill VFX Supervisor, Graeme Turnbull, describes the advert as having “all of the ingredients for that desired Christmas feeling”. The project was filmed in two polarizing locations in California: sunny Downtown LA & 11,000 ft up Mommoth Mountain. “The constantly changing weather conditions meant we had to stop filming at multiple points”.
Read more about the Amazon project here.
Erste Group Bank, one of the largest financial services providers in Central and Eastern Europe, asked The Mill to create a photorealistic rodeo Rudolph for their 2023 Christmas campaign. Following his establishment as the next Christmas character in town, The Mill’s photorealistic, CG reindeer had to be animated and rendered into shot plates. This was quite the challenge, requiring a full asset build with bone/muscle rig, full hair groom and FX. Of course, the harness had to be designed to be functional yet Christmassy!
Read more about our rodeo Rudolph here.
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