Framestore has created 12 spots for GEICO featuring the CG Gecko. In Options we see him strolling along a lovely beach but, as with other spots, the weather was not on our side during the shoot, so we had to re-grade the sky and sand to make it appear more sunny and warm. It was also very windy - so we needed to re-time some of the waving seagrass.
The main technical challenge in this spot was always going to be the gecko's integration with the sand. For this we used Houdini to create a surface for sandy footprints, as well as moving particles to mimic the flow of sand between the gecko's toes. Because of the nature of dynamics it was tricky to get all the sand particles to behave exactly as we wanted. In the end we got a general pass of footprints and moving sand for each shot, and then had to individually roto a handful of wayward particles per shot.
