Bernie already existed. Squirrel's red squirrel had been fronting the "making finance fairer" brand for a while - but over successive rounds of work, with different hands and different tools on him, he'd drifted. The face changed subtly from ad to ad. The fur, the proportions, the way he stood: never quite the same squirrel twice.
Great Company's brief to Matter was to fix this. Not redesign him - Squirrel's audience already knew Bernie - but to lock him down, so that every future piece of work was consistent. The work started with a character study: Bernie rebuilt as an AI character and put through his paces - poses, props, expressions, angles - until the coat, the eyes, the weight on the floor and the grin held from frame to frame. One squirrel, the same animal every time, so the keys pose and the sleep-mask pose are unmistakably the same Bernie.
With the character locked, the campaign followed: twenty pieces of creative for print and outdoor. Every one was built on white, square to camera, and supplied as a layered file - Bernie cut out, props and shadow on their own layers - so the agency's artworkers could drop him straight into layouts, move him, scale him and build new executions without coming back for a reshoot.
Then the campaign extended. Because Bernie was now a consistent, locked character, he could move - the same build carried into a broadcast TVC and social video without a re-cast or a redesign. The squirrel Squirrel already had, finally behaving like one character.
One character study. Twenty pieces of creative for print and outdoor, delivered as layered files for future artwork. An extended campaign including a broadcast TVC and social video - all from a single, consistent character build.
