When pigs fly...

This was a romantic depiction of a farmer in the English countryside working dilligently to provide an ideal environment for his unique livestock of flying pigs. It’s a dramatic build-up of the preparation the landing strip and the pigs preparing for their take-off that climaxes in their taxi and eventual take-off into the sunset. Every shot involved some manner of special effects to create the ideallic setting and make the pigs... fly! As mentioned above, every shot in the commercial involved special effects. The entire piece was shot on a massive stage location outside of London. The interior set needed to feel like a realistic outdoor coutryside location. As a result the skies and landscape needed to be inserted and tracked properly to integrate properly. This was a huge task and was an aesthetic challenge as much as a technical one. The pigs seen throughout the commercial were not trained to work as a trio and were therefore combined from three separate passes. Because they needed to interact in quite close proximity this was a challenge to select the right footage from hundreds of takes and then rotoscope their motion to blend the trio together. Finally, the aerial aerobatics the flying pigs perform were created using entirely CGI pigs. The CGI pigs were tracked and composited into numerous aerial plates to create a seamless photo-realistic sequence.