Breuninger - Spring/Summer 2022

Year: 2022
Client: Breuninger
Discipline: Butterfly Animation, Vellum Simulation & Rendering
Role: Butterfly Animation, Vellum Simulation, and Shot Integration & Rendering

Overhead campaign shot: five models in summer clothes lie on a lawn among ferns and flowers, while small blue butterflies flutter over them.

Screenshot of a Houdini tool's parameters for the butterfly: geometry caches, retime and variation sources, speed, scale and offset controls, and jiggle settings. — The butterfly animation tool

For Breuninger’s Spring/Summer 2022 campaign, I animated and rendered butterflies across a series of shots. Starting from an existing butterfly model, I used Vellum to develop broad, fluid wing movements. The goal was not strict realism, but an elegant motion that worked with each composition. I then art-directed the butterflies’ paths and placement shot by shot.

The production used an unusual virtual-production workflow. The live-action scenes were filmed on a stage in Munich surrounded by LED panels displaying Unreal Engine environments, and the camera setup recorded its 3D movement during the shoot. The compositing team used that data in Nuke to prepare tracked cameras and rough proxies of the characters’ positions, which I used to place and animate the butterflies in the scenes.

I delivered the final butterfly renders and worked with the external compositing team to supply the passes they needed, including motion vectors and depth. The full set of shots was completed in approximately two weeks.