Bones & Bonito Virtual Influencers
Kiehls
ZeroSpace partnered with Kiehl’s to turn their legacy mascot Mr. Bones into a virtual influencer on TikTok. The campaign launched in 2024 with creator Caitlin Reilly, featuring cinematic, character-driven 3D content creation in a stylized virtual world.
Project Breakdown
This was the first major project I was part of at Zero Space, and the first truly long-term project I’d ever worked on. Because of that, it’s the one that taught me what it actually means to work with a client over the full lifecycle. Initial experimentation, failed ideas, iteration on characters, new techniques picked up along the way, and eventually building automation pipelines to keep up with the scale. It was frustrating at times and ultimately really fruitful. It was probably the most educational project of my first year or two as a tech artist.
VFX
As the project evolved, I started picking up VFX work. My first effects were basic shaders for social media posts and some ambient environment VFX that lived in the animation scenes. Nothing crazy, but this was my introduction to real-time VFX and the moment I actually started learning how shaders work. Eventually I picked up some Houdini for the more complex effects that came later in the project.
Python Automation
The part I’m probably most proud of came near the end. By that point we were generating so many mocap assets that managing everything by hand was getting out of control. I dug into Unreal’s Python scripting API and, in collaboration with another team member, built an automation pipeline that tied the VFX side and the mocap side together.
The core flow was this: during a mocap session we’d record a bunch of witness footage. Our producer would edit the witness footage in Premiere and hand back an XML. Using that XML, I could automate the import and creation of Unreal sequencers directly. It meant the edit only needed to happen once, on the Premiere side, and everything downstream built itself. This was the first time I really saw how much leverage automation could give a small team, and it’s a pattern I’ve kept coming back to ever since.
Mocap Recording Sessions
I started as a mocap technician, recording talent and cleaning up mocap for the initial Bones and Bonitos animation campaigns.