This was the first fully CG creature project for the team at The Mill's newest studio in Chicago. Head of Production, Andrew Sommerville, explains "In the initial tests an animatronic moose was used, but this didn't give the high level of detail and realism that Energy BBDO were looking for. We knew we'd  get better results and more flexibility in the performance if we built our moose from scratch in CG."

Led by The Mill's Head of 3D, Steve Beck, "Moose" began with all kinds of research. Steve explains "Moose have a unique size and shape and we looked through a lot of references before arriving at our final design. From there it was both a technical and an artistic challenge to create and animate our moose so that it looked 100% photo-real with the element of emotion but without looking cartoony.

"Something I didn't know about moose before we started this project is that they all look so different! It was near on impossible to find two that looked similar for reference for the overall look and fur. To help perfect the fur we developed a new fur pipeline with our R&D team in our LA studio using a combination of Maya and Houdini. It took some time to get our look right, but what started out looking like a toy finished up looking like a trained moose. We are all very happy with the final film."