Mill producer Josh Robinson comments, "When Paul approached us with the idea we were intrigued. We thought the idea was simple but incredibly effective and very funny. The challenge was to create CG elements that would need to be composited onto a jumper, whilst changing the colour of Sarah Lund's jumper throughout. Paul allowed Mill Flame artist Jay Bandlish and the CG team to art direct the animation themselves and we're very pleased with how well it's been received. Hopefully the spot will help raise lots of money for the charity!"
CG artist James Mulholland tells us a bit more about how the jumper was created, "We were given the incredibly fun task of creating an over the top, garish christmas jumper for the punchline of the ad. The first and definitely most challenging task was getting the 3D roto right on the character Chris' real jumper. We used an existing rig of a man, skinned a modelled jumper onto it and matchmoved the moves of the actor. Tracking the subtle wrinkles of the jumper was one of the biggest challenges. We then used this animated geometry to pin decorations to the faces of the jumper geo, which we individually modelled and textured. We used N-cloth dynamics to simulate the swinging of the baubles and bells before finally shading the decorations, adding twinkling geometry lights and glitter to the tree and lighting the shot."