Sweet manufacturer Ferrero, contacted us about creating three adverts for the next release of their Mon Cheri cherry sweets. Every year Ferrero have a marketing campaign centred around the fact that their sweets are made from the first to ripen cherries as a result of which they have the best flavour and texture.  Steve supervised the photo-shoot in Italy and supplied the HDR images, Rich rigged the cherries for animation and Andy animated them. I was responsible for everything else. modelling, sculpting, textures, shading, lighting, break outs, rendering and compositing, all done with Lightwave, Zbrush and Fusion.

The client didn’t know what kind of look to go for with the cherries so on the first day I quickly rendered off a few styles so they could suggest some kind of direction. Initially they went for realistic and matching the cherries seen in the trees but near the end they decided they wanted to match the painted wooden prop that was used in all the printed and film material. The colour was also important. Within hours of cherries leaving the tree they turn from red to dark purple. Naturally all the real cherries I was supplied with were purple but to emphasise the ripeness Ferrero have always used red in their adverts.

In a local park I managed to find some cherry trees and borrowed some leaves and a twig to use as textures (fully intending to give them back, naturally). Peeling the bark off a twig without damaging it is surprisingly difficult! From these I derived colour, normal and spec and also sculpted a twig in zbrush to match the texture.

In the final adverts the cherries were voiced by two well known Italian comedians and were apparently very funny if a complete departure from the usual sensual direction. Ferrero were presumably very happy with what we did as they came back to us the following year but we were unfortunately too busy.

You can see one advert in the gallery or all three scalable and in HD, although to be honest, without the sound they all very much alike ..