Five 3D-artists and two flame compositors worked a little over three weeks to complete this spot featuring a beatboxing dog for Tele2/Comviq, which is a Swedish telecom company. All done in Softimage|XSI 6.5 and Flame.

A beatboxing artist was flown to Sweden from New York, and a beat boxing session was performed in a Stockholm-based sound studio, beatboxing while making dog sounds at the same time. Stopp recorded video of his performance to get inspiration for the motion required to beat box.

The CG production was focused on two distinct areas, look and motion. The animation team would block out the sequences to set the timing together with diector Christoffer von Reis and the agency. When blocking was approved the motion would be refined in a few more steps and finally secondary motion was added to the animation.

The look and feel of the dog was very important to get the desired effect, Stopp brought in the dog to the office and shot plenty of reference material of every part of the dogs head. The fur was shaded with a novel approach which allowed anisotropic shading which is seen in short fur, and also allowed a very high number of hair strands for a soft realistic look.

The compositing team brought it all together, first removing the dog head from the plate, then compositing the CG head on top.

Stopp Interactive took the animated material from the Tele2 commercial and made it interactive. A “make your own beatbox”-application was created in Flash.

The viral version of the dog has over 1.5 million views on Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NBFRNEztSU