What SuperValu wanted
SuperValu and TBWA had a television campaign built around a custom creature, the kind of character a production spends real money bringing to life for thirty seconds of broadcast and then, most of the time, retires the moment the media schedule moves on. SuperValu didn't want to retire it. They wanted the creature to keep working after the ad break, in the place people were already spending their time, which meant putting it directly in fans' hands rather than only in front of their eyes. The brief was to take a character built for one screen and one direction of viewing, and let people bring it into their own TikTok videos on their own terms.
The constraint worth naming
The creature had only ever existed for the TV ad. It lived in whatever rig the production used for broadcast, performing exactly the moves the script called for, rendered once, graded once, and finished. None of that runs on a phone. A TikTok filter has to track a face or a room in real time, on whatever handset a fan happens to be holding, nowhere near a render farm and nowhere near the control a broadcast edit gets. Getting the creature out of the finished TVC and into something a fan could summon with their own front camera meant building it again from nothing rather than repurposing the broadcast asset, while still landing on something instantly recognisable as the same character from the campaign.
What we built
We modelled the creature in 3D from the ground up and turned that model into a TikTok filter. Open the effect, point the camera, and the creature appears, tracked live, ready to drop into whatever a fan was already filming, whether that was a face-led clip or a shot of the room around them. The look was kept locked to the wider campaign at every stage, so anyone who had seen the TV ad would recognise the character immediately rather than meeting a reinterpretation of it wearing the same name.
How it was made
The modelling had one job: match the campaign, not reinterpret it. Every proportion, colour and detail had to read as the same creature people had watched on television, just rebuilt so it could run on a phone rather than sit rendered on a broadcast tape. Once the model held up next to the TV ad, it went into TikTok's own effect tools with live face and world tracking built in, and had to hold that tracking on ordinary handsets, not just the newest phone it happened to be built and tested on. Getting a broadcast character to survive that jump, and still look like itself once it's tracking a moving, imperfect phone camera rather than a locked-off studio shot, is the actual work behind a filter like this.
What happened
The filter shipped on TikTok, tied to SuperValu's TV campaign and built to TBWA's creative, so fans could put the creature in their own videos rather than only see it in someone else's ad.