"The agency creativity was hilarious, so our goal was to reinforce the comedy with visual effects. The tree was a prop and a rig had been built to make it fall several times. Later on, in post we added the CG mouth, dust and some extra plates with branches, pine cones falling on top of it. The biggest challenge was to create a mouth based on the bark and articulate it in a way that seemed natural."

3D Artist, Kevin Ives, on bringing the tree to life "The tree was surprisingly a challenge. We saw him go through quite a few iterations. Obviously there are no actual talking trees we could look to for reference. We knew we had to make it look as physically believable as possible. We tried to keep all the bark pieces rigid and ended up with much of the tree animating because of the interlocking pieces. In the final version we still have the bark pieces moving independently but they have a bit of flex to them, which allows for a much more subtle performance from the tree. The voice talent strongly influences the animation. I think we were able to stay true to that hilarious performance. Our goal, as always, was to accentuate what's great about the actors reading and try not to be distracting."