VFX Breakdown: Deutsche Telekom’s Peter the Cat
Absolute’s award-winning VFX team recently completed work on a hilarious advert for Deutsche Telekom, where family cat ‘Peter’ comes to life. Inspired after joining a phone deal to unlock better savings, Peter discovers a whole world of online shopping, dating apps and gaming, much to the family’s dismay. The team had a unique set of challenges, integrating seamlessly, realistic CG cat paws over live action footage. Creative director Tony Atherton and CG supervisor Patrick Keogh reflect on the innovative techniques they used to make the commercial a standout success:
“We are big fans of Houdini at Absolute, having used it for projects including Amazon Prime’s ‘The Rig’ and Apple TV’s ‘The Buccaneers’” said Tony Atherton, creative director of CG at Absolute. “Along the way, we’ve used it to engineer everything from winter landscapes to dynamic underwater scenes. So, it was a natural choice for this project, that while fun, did present us with some unique challenges to navigate.
Left, Patrick Keogh, right, Tony Atherton
The whole essence of the advert centres around surrealism, so we had to ensure every shot of the cat felt authentic, despite his larger than life actions. To do this, we had to integrate CG paws with the real-life footage, complimenting the cat without distracting from it.”
Tony continued “Houdini helped us massively on this project. We used it for: the grooming of the cat fur, look development of the phone and cat assets, as well as the final layout and lighting in the Solaris environment. We knew there was only going to be a small team working on the project and Houdini allowed us to be super efficient.”
Absolute CG supervisor Patrick Keogh agreed, adding “It gave us the ability to build a pipeline straight away without the need for lots of custom code, letting us get our phone and cat assets rolled out to lots of shots quickly and meaning we could really hit the ground running. The fur procedural was great too, it meant we didn't need to run lots of heavy fur caches, everything just happened magically at render time which was fantastic.
The procedural nature of Houdini was key to making this project such a success for us. Its open-ended framework meant that our artists could develop tools and systems to help manage everything from the fur to animated geometry. The ability to get so much done on a constrained timeline was incredibly helpful to us.”
Rebekah King-Britton, head of CG at Absolute stated, “The success of these sequences wouldn’t have been possible without the incredible talent of Tony, Patrick and the whole team here at Absolute. Each person brought their best, and it’s brilliant to see their hard work be recognised on some truly standout effects.
“The unique challenges that we had to overcome on this project really called on our expertise as a department. We were able to use our experience, crafting visual effects that were both immersive and surreal, something that was crucial to the narrative of the piece. While challenging, it was immensely rewarding, and we are so excited to see how audiences have been reacting to our work.”
A full breakdown of Aboslute’s work on Deutsche Telekom ‘Peter’ can be found below, while Absolute’s VFX team’s wider work can be viewed here
