Floralp

Floralp is the premium butter of Schweizer Milchproduzenten, made exclusively from Swiss cream and never frozen. Its promise is two words long: "Simple. Natural."

• Client: Schweizer Milchproduzenten SMP
• Built by: Geyst AG (Jan Stalder)
• Period: 2020–2022

Floralp is the premium butter of Schweizer Milchproduzenten, made exclusively from Swiss cream and never frozen. Its promise is two words long: "Simple. Natural."

Anyone who promises naturalness cannot convey it with images that look computer-generated. For a campaign by Schweizer Milchproduzenten SMP, Geyst AG creates the spot "Festival Minis": ten seconds in which the pack stands on a festival stage, sparks rise, and a crowd made up entirely of little bread rolls cheers in front of it. The idea is simple, the execution is not. The rolls are right in front of the camera and have to pass as real baked goods, with crust, cracks and shine, and yet still be able to turn and cheer. Jan Stalder takes on the 3D side and chooses the most honest route: the rolls are not modelled, they are baked.

• Home-baked rolls • Photogrammetry in the studio • 113 to 167 shots per roll • Textures at 4096 pixels • Eyes as separate models • 2.5D in After Effects • Butter and raisins scanned too • A ten-second spot

Real beats perfect

A modelled roll would have to recreate crust, cracks and glaze and would still look computer-generated. A baked one already has all of it. So on 24 May 2022 the rolls are in the studio, each on its own thin rod, suspended in space, so the camera can see it from every side: between 113 and 167 shots per roll, with a second pass the next day. Since the studio is set up anyway, a pack of Floralp and a handful of raisins go through the photogrammetry too.

From oven to computer

Each photo series becomes a point cloud, then a model and a texture, crust and crumb as image fragments in a texture atlas. After clean-up, the final textures for colour, normals, shadow and roughness are made in Substance Painter, each 4096 by 4096 pixels. The result is baked goods the camera can show at close range.

An audience with eyes

A crowd needs faces, but not too many. The eyes are separate models, kept apart from the bread, and every roll is available with and without eyes. That way the audience can be mixed: most simply remain bread, a few turn towards the stage and watch, and that is exactly where the viewer's eye goes first. The punchline lands before the spot spells it out.

Ten seconds of festival

Geyst's editor assembles the spot in After Effects, the rolls as layers in space, in a 2.5D technique that Jan Stalder builds for the job and hands over. The pack appears on the stage, the camera moves in and back out, fountains of sparks rise, the crowd sways in front of it. At the end only the pack and one line remain: "The original. Irresistible."

An audience that stays

In July 2022 the spot is finished, and the rolls stay in service: as a library of models and textures, with and without eyes, they reappear in Floralp's subsequent campaigns without anyone having to fire up an oven again. It is probably the only audience in Switzerland that started out in an oven.