As filmmakers and advertisers we use different tools to convey our message and in the past if you wanted to use animals you had to use animals, but we've reached a tipping point with technology; we don't actually have to use animals in advertising. We want to show it is possible to do feature film quality emotion and story telling with CGI animals, without necessarily costing that much.

To create PETA ‘98% Human’ we created a totally believable, photo-real CG Chimp. This has never been fully undertaken by any VFX studio before; all previous primates include some form of motion capture, making this project one of the most detailed and technically challenging jobs we have ever taken on.

To create this photo-real CG Chimp we decided to use full animation, not the more traditional form of motion capture. This was for two reasons; as the purpose of the commercial is to highlight the cause of using primates in commercials so we would not use a real chimpanzee, and using humans with Motion Capture can be too constraining; a human cannot effectively portray a primate's movements or nuances with the amount of realism that we, and the client wanted.

Conventionally, as with Gollum in Lord of the Rings, or Caesar in Planet of the Apes the animation is normally captured through the process of Mo-Cap but we wanted the flexibility to experiment with a shot and not be locked into a performance of someone pretending to be a chimp would give. So we shot an actor without the use of motion capture to use him just as a base reference for the animation, composition and placement. This provided our team of animators with the ability to mimic chimp like movement with far greater accuracy.

The key challenge was creating a realism and a level of detail our animators needed to create in order to capture the photo-real look and lifelike movements. having the chimp look and feel totally real involved hundreds of reference pictures, and hours of chimp footage looping next to every animator, lighter, modeler and rigger and even a research trip to Zoos for every member of the team.

To create the chimp in CG, we essentially started from nothing, just a blank 3D canvas. We didn't have chimp scans we could simply import into our 3D software, or a chimp that we had previously created or used in a previous project. We had to create everything, every strand of hair, every fingernail, every wrinkle and vein through to blemishes and colour of the skin.

Throughout the spot the viewer is looking in on the chimp through a window, so the compositor had to create the glass over many of the shots. He selectively graded each shot to guide the viewer's eye. By lifting or turning down the grade to draw the viewer's eye the compositor could actively focus the viewer's attention to the subtle actions of the chimps eyes, mouth, and hands. As well as the chimp and the room itself, the glass is also tooled to guide the viewer.

The skin was created by painting layer upon layer of distress, especially on the hands where every wrinkle and imperfection was discussed. The hands were very interesting as chimps walk on their knuckles, so the knuckles are leathery. But as you go up the hand into the palm the skin becomes much softer and translucent. As the artists worked they found that the more imperfections and damage they created on the skin the more realistic it looked.

The hair was a source of much work and discussion. In captivity, many live by themselves and become disheveled; there is no one to groom and clean them. The fur and hair team was tasked with showing this messiness, and relating the state in which this poor chimp lives, as filthy as his filthy environment.

The grooming was done with ICE in XSI. Guide hairs were created and software interpolates the hair and spreads it across a map created by the Model and Texture teams. Artits worked to create a messy, un-kept look with speckles and spots of dirt in his fur, each bit of dust was carefully placed.