The hummingbird mimics the lightweight technology of the Audi A6 Avant car and his design looks and feels like it was engineered by Audi. The bird is light, agile, playful and most importantly, likable.This was a particularly exciting and challenging, as this campaign also marked the first time that Audi had used a ‘living’ character in its commercials. We took something that exists in real life, the bird, and re-made him out of entirely different textures and materials, while still acting and moving like the real thing. To make him as believable as possible we developed the personality of the hummingbird. This meant that the bird's movement and body language were the main ways we could express his character, and our team used lots of real life hummingbird footage as reference.

Once the bird’s design was defined, the animation team started building the animatic based on the director’s storyboards. They tried out various ideas, experimenting with the animation to find the right way to transmit the essence of the character and the story and show certain qualities of the car in this tiny hummingbird.