This is the story of a little boy and his imaginary friend – an enormous pink elephant.

The film shows the little ritual they like to enjoy before sharing a piece of Mr Kipling cake.

As Britain’s best selling cake brand, Mr Kipling created this campaign to remind consumers that 'Life is better with cake'.

The challenge was to create an entirely CG elephant that was full of character and personality, whilst ensuring it maintained a sense of realism. It needed to feature every element of detail possible, including wrinkles, skin folds and careful texturing to ensure the skin and hair had a sense of realism in the way they captured every light reflection.

As well as creating a photo-real model, using a real elephant from Woburn Safari Park named Chandrika as reference, the team had to seamlessly rig and comp the elephant into each live action plate so it could realistically interact with the young boy protagonist. During the shoot, we used a choreographer in place of the elephant (dressed in a pink body suit), in order to encourage the most realistic interactions between the boy and (future) elephant.

This was one of the first CG projects we had been involved in wherein they used muscle and skin simulations to recreate the way the underlying physiology of the elephant influences the way its skin slides, bulges and folds. This truly helped to give a more real feeling to the way the elephant moved and interacts.