Valspar's most recent campaign 'Chameleon'

Jon and Val are just a typical married CG chameleon couple turned reptilian representatives in Valspar's new spot 'Choices'.


From the live action shoot, where two life size 3D printed models were used as stand-ins for the chameleons to editorial, CG, Animation, design and 2D, The Mill and Mill+ teams worked to help ‘Jon and Val’ step out from their intricate animal world and become full CGI actors.

For Mill+ directors Ben Smith and Yann Mabille the real trick was giving their two stars a distinctive personality without compromising their animal nature. Chameleons are more engaging as characters when we tap into their features as animals and not humans. So, the goal was to make sure Jon and Val looked friendly and instantly readable as chameleons! We developed who they are by going through a full character concept exploration.

While it was important to perfect the two as individuals, the way they interacted as a couple was another very key challenge. They are two fully CGI creatures, and their movements had to be animated perfectly, especially nice chameleons have such a distinctive may of moving that anyone would instantly notice if it wasn’t perfect. A fun part of the process was giving Jon and Val the subtle, nuanced animation that made them really feel and act like a married couple, with a sign here, a roll of the eye there, with an overall physical familiarity that speaks of their enduring marriage and relationship.

Our character designers created the look of the Jon and Val, delicately shading between the lines of personality and reality.

One of the largest challenges the VFX team faced was creating color transitions across the skin of the chameleons. They came up with a utility pass in Nuke that has a ZDepth pass in the red green and blue channels that gave full control of color changes. This made it possible to create smooth natural looking color transitions as Jon and Val place their feet on different color swatches.

In order to perfect the detail across the skin of the chameleons, all the little dots and dents, the chameleons were sculpted with a 64k displacement map, and our animation team used muscles to drive the skin on the chameleons.

We also used two real chameleons as reference. This helped the team determine how much the skin stretched, how the wrinkles appeared, and how the Chameleons color transitions appeared.

They built the whole environment after the shoot using HDR 360 footage. This was projected onto the geometry of the room and all the light and reflections in the environment could be controlled to exact specifications.

It was essential to create characters that looked and moved in a very realistic way. Nothing cartoony or stylized. They still needed to talk however, so creating mouth shapes and movement that was sensitive to that was critical.

The end film is a colorful and charming piece with two loveable characters that perfectly embody the do-it-yourself spirit that comes with home improvement.