Kermit finds himself in the middle of a selfish and crazy New York where every inhabitant is played by the wired ‘Animal’ character from the Muppets. It’s only by drinking Lipton Tea, that Kermit manages to maintain his renowned calmness and good nature to all.

The challenge in this commercial was in creating a New York filled with millions of ‘Animal’ characters form the Muppets. To achieve this we used a combination of real puppets and CGI.

With only 7 ‘Animals’ puppets at our disposal, we had to redressed them into 53 different costumes.

With these different groups of 7 ‘Animals’ we then filmed on location and built up on multiple layers shot against blue screen. (Most scenes have smaller out of focus CG ‘Animals’ in the background.)

The real technical challenge came within the wider shots - to create crowds walking around a city and having more involved AI. These were entirely CG crowd simulation, filling stock footage of NY with our ‘Animals’. We used a Maya plugin for the crowd simulation called Golaem.

The ‘diner scene’ was a studio set and the street outside shot separately along with repeated ‘Animals’ walking by on blue screen. The set was built a meter off the ground for the Puppeteers to operate the Muppets as seemingly ‘walking’ around the diner.

Other shots had street/view extensions. Such as the final shot and the alleyway sequence, which was shot on blue screen and had traffic, animals (2D) and street vista added.

Other challenges were the schedule - we had only 3 weeks to post a 60 and a 90 sec, with a total of 54 separate shots.