This project is more than just a single piece of animation. It's a brand new world! With its purple tracksuit and effortless, rhythmic movements, we had a delightful time bringing the Smart Arm to life.

Smart is Australia’s leading provider of salary packaging and novated leasing, helping employees reduce tax and increase their take-home pay through a range of employee benefits. Working in partnership with Cocogun, we created a brand new, frictionless 'Smart' world that reflected the product benefits. Something intentionally different for the category, a textural, bright and optimistic piece as opposed to corporate, everyday and generic.

The focus was on the Smart arm stretching to represent a stretched salary, going through the world and upgrading its purchases thanks to financial products offered. A custom soundtrack provides the hook, and working with a bespoke jingle is always fun to do. It provides full creative control over the pacing, message and vibes for the campaign.

The arm build itself was one of the more technical problems to solve. It needed to operate in many ways like a snake rig, with the ability to follow a smooth path. But it also had to have freedom for the front of the arm to move independently for grabbing objects, fist bumping logos and ripping a ‘knee’ slide. And of course stretch!

The 3D team were able to trial and error a range of techniques, ultimately combining them into one master rig that gave the animator the flexibility to switch animation modes depending on the action required. Everything was created through our usual 3D pipeline with Maya and Redshift for 3D and Nuke for compositing. Our environment and grass setup is all Maya native through Bifrost.

Says director Mike Lomas, "I loved working in that slightly graphical, miniature 3D style, and also the custom jingle aspect. You can push the look to get really nice imagery and craft each scene. The soundtrack then allows you to bounce back and forth with timing and get everything working together. You’re not trying to force different things together, everything is being designed from scratch to work in unison."