For Meow Mix Gravy Bursts, I had the opportunity to co-direct alongside Ryan Staake in a fantastic collaboration with BBH, helping take the brand’s iconic cats into a new visual direction. This marked the first time Meow Mix moved beyond its traditionally real or puppeteered cats to create a fully CG character, giving us the freedom to bring a new level of realism, personality and performance to an anthropomorphized animal. A key part of the process was capturing the performance of a real saxophonist through motion capture, allowing us to preserve the nuance, rhythm and physicality of an authentic musician while translating it into the body of a cat. On set, we used a real-time version of the CG character driven directly by the motion-capture data, giving us immediate feedback on how each performance translated. This became an invaluable directing tool for shaping the actor’s movement and timing, while also giving the client an early, rudimentary but incredibly useful view of how the final performance would feel once embodied by the cat. The result was a unique combination of performance capture, character animation and visual effects that gave us both the realism and creative freedom to push the comedy and personality of the campaign.