Colds, coughs and flu are some of the undeniable realities of winter, which being somewhat less appealing than food, family and gifts, tend to feature less in seasonal advertising. But when such ailments strike, they can often feel insurmountable – visualised in this spot as a rain cloud that just won’t go away.  Lemsip Max All-in-One is the perfect way to combat these illnesses: a household superhero for the winter months, which can blow away even the most persistent bugs.

3D lead artist, Mike Chapman describes the different aspects of creating the spot, “There were two main challenges for this advert, firstly we were revamping and bringing Lemmy to life, this was the first time we had done a Lemsip ad with this character and it felt important to really push the characterization as far as possible. We did this through animation, using Maya, and his details and texture. Our animation team worked closely with Director Jon Riche to ensure that we maximised every opportunity to get across Lemmy’s playful character.

The second challenge was to create the cloud and blizzard that follows the protagonist around until Lemmy comes in to save the day. We built a stylized yet believable cloud in Houdini that had to react to changing environments and lighting.  Some real rain and snow was shot on set in order to make the interaction with the actor as believable as possible, and these shots were then integrated with what we had created in CG. All of the work was then rendered using Arnold before being comped in Nuke.”