Moving story with 6 million hairs

New formula - new shape: with this slogan on the packaging, Hauert wants to keep existing customers happy. But the number 1 for horticultural fertilizers wants even more with the launch: to appeal to new, especially young customers in cities. After all, urban gardening and balcony gardening are very much in vogue among them. The Hauertkugel is the perfect product for the new balcony gardeners: you bury it at the start of the season and can forget about fertilizing. This convenience product is advertised by the In Flagranti agency in Lyss. The lead medium is a TV commercial. The campaign is rounded off with online and POS measures. The hero of the commercial is a squirrel, as these animals tend to bury and forget nut-shaped nutrients. To make this idea as convincing as possible in an attractive film, the specialists at Boutiq created a completely computer-animated squirrel. A Swiss premiere.

Adrian Suter was responsible for supervising the spot. The head of animation at Boutiq attended the first animation course at Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts eight years ago. He later worked at Frame Eleven and founded his own company before joining the Boutiq team. Hauert wanted a photorealistic squirrel, as natural as possible and not a comic figure. This also meant a real animation and not a cartoon animation. "We wanted an ordinary viewer not to get the idea that we were working with an animated squirrel," explains Mike Huber, who is responsible for the direction.

To bring the effect of real life to the large poster, Sermir Saleh from the Boutiq 3-D team gave the cute little animal a coat with 6 million individual hairs. For the animated film, these were trimmed down to 1.5 million. Of course, this required a corresponding amount of computing time. In total, Boutiq spent two weeks animating the squirrel for the 22-second spot. It also took ten days for the plants. These can be seen in the finished film in a compositing of real flowers and photorealistic 3D objects. Boutiq opted for a real background because the balcony was to bloom in a magnificent floral splendor at the end of the film. A suitable villa with a terrace was scouted on the Gold Coast. Together with a gardener and a stylist, Hauert decorated it with exquisite plants in large pots. The set was then captured on real film according to a precise storyboard. The irony for the master gardener involved was that he had to use all his skills to ensure that only wilted plants appeared in the first shots. Only for the "happy ending" were the flowers allowed to unfold their full splendor.

In order to make the background look realistic, invisible threads were attached to the stems of the plants. These were used to move the greenery to simulate the animal's interaction with the environment. To be able to animate the squirrel's movements correctly, Suter studied countless animal films on YouTube. "My girlfriend's dog also helped a little. I used him to analyze the mechanics of walking on four legs," says Suter. The dog spent most of his time sneaking around the computer at Boutiq in Erlenbach. Light also played an important role in the design. The specialists at Boutiq used a stuffed squirrel as a "stand-in". Andreas Panzeri