Conference: PETA 98% Human by Vince Baertsoen

PETA 98% Human by Vince Baertsoen from The Mill


PETA "98% Human" Commercial from The Aramean on Vimeo.

The Mill were approached by PETA do create a photo-real chimpanzee for a campaign they wanted to run, however The Mill needed more time to develop the skills that were needed to give the desired result so they took the brief from PETA much later on in the future.The campaign was to protect real apes from being used in commercials and other tests in life so the advert could use a chimpanzee.
The Mill were able to produce an extremely photo-real chimpanzee, bespoke technology had to be created for the modelling of the skin and muscle simulation. This has created more briefs that require photo-real animals for The Mill, as they are currently working on one for Sky TV.

Chimpanzee Research

To produce the desired result, they spent a lot of time looking at references, looked at videos of apes and chimpanzees walking and images and past films that have ape characters such as King Kong.

They had to learn the movement of the chimpanzee/apes and their facial expressions especially how the skin over their muscles moved, this all needed to be animated so minor details were important.

The reason they did not use motion capture for the movement was because the main aim was to make the chimpanzee look extremely photorealistic, so they had to weigh the options of whether to use it or not and motion capture would not have produced the minor details they wanted.

It was the animators job to make the chimpanzee look real so having an actor act out the actions of the chimpanzee made it a useful reference when it came to animating.
A muscle, blood and skin system were created for the chimpanzee model. The creation of a blood system allowed the chimpanzee to look more life-like.

They used a vector displacement map which allowed the wrinkles on the chimpanzee's skin to move much better and look realistic.

However, the main goal was to express the emotion of the character and story.