Our campaign tells a fresh story showing the powerful emotion of family togetherness. The story features a family of Bears, living in a human world doing things that humans do. However, modern life is pulling them apart through everyday distractions such as technology and work. When Mama gets home late to realise she’s missed bed time again she decides to take action. The next day the family travel to Centre Parcs where tablets are downed and the whole family are able to reconnect with nature and each other. Replacing people with Bears intensified the emotion, highlighting at the start of the ad the ridiculousness of the lives we lead, whilst at the end magnifying the joy of spending time with our family in nature.

The challenge we set ourselves for Centre Parcs was to create a photo realistic family of bears in CGI. Our director decided to shoot with real actors in order to gather sufficient information in facial expressions and movement before transitioning into animation. The actors were placed in the offline cut to give the Clients a preview of the performance and interactions we would replicate with the Bears.

While filming, each shot was captured 3 ways – With lighting and texture passes for when the bears were imbedded in, shots with the actors, and finally a completely clean shot.

Our post house spent extensive time in bear research to ensure the final bears looked photo real. Illustrations were drawn before the modelling and fur phase, and these were referred to throughout the process to ensure accuracy.

Ultimately it took 25 animators 3 months and 10,450 hours to bring the bears to life.