Going down the ‘Rabbit Hole’ in 3D Inertia Studios on how they used Maxon One to create a showstopping anamorphic for Tubi.

When creative agency Mischief asked for a disruptive digital billboard teaser, Inertia Studios delivered a uniquely jaw-dropping anamorphic campaign.

For one week in February, drivers and pedestrians in Los Angeles and New York City were entertained by the immersive wow factor of a gigantic 3D rabbit leaning out beyond its frame, actively trying to engage with them. Created to promote Mischief’s Super Bowl campaign for U.S. streaming service, Tubi, the playful rabbit-with-attitude was brought to life using Cinema 4D, Maya, ZBrush and Redshift.

Thomas Valente, Inertia’s founder and executive creative director, calls 3D anamorphic screens the studio’s “creative playground.” “They’re an exciting blend of art and technology that allows you to create the illusion that a piece of content is physically right in front of you,” he says. “That's the magic and power of these screens.”

Anamorphic illusion technology, also called naked-eye 3D, employs a curved LED screen to deliver an optical illusion, usually at large scale, which for this project was a massive 1388 square meters. By harnessing the principles of stereopsis and forced perspective based on a specific vantage point, Inertia’s team creates larger-than-life 3D content with seemingly holographic properties.

Describing Inertia as a forward-thinking, independent creative studio specializing in film, motion and 3D imagery, Valente explains that the company is split between Inertia Studios and Inertia Labs.

Inertia Studios focuses on 3D product and brand films for the luxury, sportswear, automotive and entertainment industries. Labs is home to the company’s innovation work, and digital advertising billboards, having delivered 50-plus projects in the U.S. and globally.

“Rabbit Hole” was Inertia’s first collaboration with Mischief and the brief was to create a viral “WTF” moment through an immersive out-of-home (OOH) ad campaign.

Having seen Inertia’s work, New York-based Mischief trusted the studio’s creative vision and pushed them to experiment and innovate. “We had insight into the product’s message and the rabbit character, which informed the concept,” Valente recalls. “We had a lot of freedom in the execution, driving the creative thinking about how the rabbit was portrayed, and we chose to use multiple screens to elevate the experience,” he adds.

Unpacking the complexities of anamorphic projects, Creative Lead Jack Lietti notes that managing the image distortion inherent in forced perspective is a key challenge. “You can push the illusion using the angles of the curved screen, but everything comes down to what we call the sweet spot, where the camera is in relation to the viewer. From there, you can see the illusion clearly, but beyond it, the image slowly begins to distort.”

To manage that, Lietti uses Cinema 4D’s camera calibrator to rebuild real-world locations in 3D and lock the perspective based on photos from the sweet spot camera location.

Getting the right look, narrative, and movement for the rabbit was critical to the billboard’s success and involved a core team, including Valente, Lietti, Art Director Henry Yeomans, several animators, along with riggers and modelers as needed.

The team’s creative toolset included Cinema 4D for pre-production, production and fur effects; Maya for character modeling, advanced rigging and animation; ZBrush for sculpting details; Redshift for lighting and rendering; and After Effects for compositing.

Once camera perspective had been fixed, it was time for R&D and creative development that allowed Inertia to explore how to maximize the content for the screen formats at each location. Valente, who worked previously as a motion designer and animator, describes the typical pre-production workflow: “Using Cinema 4D to stretch and pull our ideas, we develop narrative style frames and storyboards, typically mapping out and composing frames using very basic geometry, iterating quickly to get the strongest ideas that we stitch into animatics for client approval.”

They wanted a slightly unkempt-looking rabbit with a mischievous personality to tie in with the overall campaign concept,” Yeomans, who led character development, recalls. Maya was used to capture realistic facial expressions, and ZBrush allowed them to sculpt the subtle details of the ears, which were later transformed into texture maps. Once approved, a low-res version was imported to Cinema 4D for pre-production and animatics.

To get the right look for the rabbit’s movement inside and outside the frame, the team built a simplified version of the rig in Cinema 4D, using only IK setups for speed, to animate the advanced animatics. Animatic project files were exported to Maya as alembics, which served as guides for the final animation.

Once approved, alembics were again used to bring the rabbit back into Cinema 4D to craft the fur, using the Ornatrix plugin to control the hair style and texture.

“We used a lot of black/white texture maps to control the fur clumping, length and color variation as the hair spread from the belly and torso onto the rest of the body,” Yeomans explains. “In combination with Redshift, we were able to create a realistic look and feel after moving that fur setup into the lighting and shading phase.”

Shadows were employed to create the illusion of physical presence and dimension, helping to exaggerate the sense that the rabbit was in a real space. Using Redshift to explore different lighting variations, the team achieved a realistic sense of sunlight bouncing from the rabbit and casting shadows across the outer frame.

“Not only did that make the rabbit feel more real,” Yeomans recalls, “it also accentuated the optical effect because the audience could read the depth when the rabbit leaned out of the frame.”

Once the project was launched, even Valente was amazed at the sense of 3D depth the team managed to create. Increasingly, anamorphic ads are designed to go viral, and the sheer presence and impact of Inertia’s single-minded narrative achieved that, exceeding client expectations of disruptive storytelling in this medium.

Reflecting on the project, he is delighted with the effect created on the interactive screens at the 42nd and 8th Street location in New York City where two rabbits appear to swap screens. “I think it was a bold choice to use multiple screens to tell a story. It delivered a clever and magical immersive experience, which we were very excited about.”