Selected Work
Commercial
Passports
Commercial
Air NZ Safety Video
Commercial
Long Term Plans
Commercial
This is Kiwi
Commercial
Te Tāhuhu o te Mātauranga
Commercial
The Horse’s Mouth
Commercial
The Horse’s Mouth
Overview
A Ladbrokes campaign built around a single, impossible idea: get tips straight from the horse’s mouth. We built a fully CG hero horse capable of delivering dialogue to camera — a photoreal digital double that could lip-sync, emote, and hold its own in macro close-up alongside live-action talent. The pipeline ran from on-set HDRI and lighting reference capture, through a sculpted and groomed CG horse asset, real-time Unreal previs for the director, performance-driven facial animation, hair and eye simulation, and final comp integration into plates shot at a working racing stable. Every shot had to sell the illusion in broad daylight at close range, where any tell in the skin, fur, or mouth interior would break the gag.
Nuke
Houdini
Maya
Unreal Engine
Substance Painter
ZBrushCG Renders
Process & Approach
On-Set Supervision
We supervised the shoot at a working stable and paddock, capturing HDRI spheres, chrome and grey reference balls, MacBeth charts, and lens data for every setup. Witness cameras and clean passes were captured alongside the hero plates so the CG horse could be slotted back into the real environment with matched light, shadow, and reflection detail.
CG Horse Build
The hero horse was sculpted from reference stills of the on-set talent horse and groomed strand-by-strand — mane, forelock, muzzle fuzz, eyelashes, and inner-ear hair all treated as separate passes. Wet and dry variants of the coat were authored so the asset could match footage shot across changing weather on the day.
Unreal Previs
An Unreal Engine build of the horse let the director block performance against plates in near real time — framing, head turns, and dialogue timing were all resolved before committing to final animation. The UE preview render also doubled as a reference comp for agency approvals while the offline pipeline caught up.
Facial Animation & Comp
Dialogue was hand-animated on a custom horse facial rig tuned for anatomical plausibility — the lips and tongue had to move enough to sell speech without straying into cartoon territory. Final comp handled skin and fur integration, eye wetness, breath, and subtle defocus matching so the horse sat convincingly inside the plate at every focal length.
Selected Frames
Film
In Production
