John Lewis Christmas 2017: Moz The Monster

3D Scanning for Moz the Monster

’Moz The Monster’ needed a fully CG creature to feel like he actually lived under a real child’s bed… not floating on top of the shot, but physically present in it. We provided 3D scanning for the production to help make that happen.

We captured reference geometry of the bedroom environments Moz appears in, combining point cloud processing with high-resolution photogrammetry to deliver fully textured assets rather than bare geometry, giving the animation and effects team a grounded spatial framework to build the creature into. That’s the difference between a CG character that interacts with a room and one that just happens to be composited in front of it… Moz needed to cast the right shadow, sit at the right scale, and feel like he belonged there.

The John Lewis Christmas ad is one of the most scrutinised pieces of advertising in the UK… watched, replayed and picked apart by millions every November. That level of attention doesn’t leave much room for a CG creature that doesn’t quite sit right in its environment.

It’s a small credit on our end for a commercial that was seen tens of millions of times, but that’s usually how the best scanning work goes: nobody notices it, because it did exactly what it was supposed to.