Meet Mill Mascot – a New, Faster Way to Bring Favorite Characters to Animated Life

Mastering the art of character animation has evolved over the decades from hand-drawn to photo-real – to now an entirely new way to bring favorite characters to life. One where characters think, interact, and improvise like humans, engage with audiences and react to the world around them.

Mill Mascot addresses the ever-growing client need for fast and intelligent characters, enabling broadcast quality CG characters that are not animated but performed, live and in real-time. Combining game engine technology with motion sensors, Mill Mascot enables characters to be ‘puppeteered’ through hand and facial gestures. This gives directors, artists, and other creatives the ability to ‘direct’ or ‘perform’ CG character animation – live – and make creative decisions on the fly.

What once took weeks or months can now be done in a day. The system bypasses the lengthy timelines involved with traditional animation and pre-rendered content, reducing animation and rendering time down to 42 milliseconds per frame.

Providing the ability to interact with CG characters and create animations on the spot makes Mill Mascot the perfect solution for immediate, culturally-relevant social media content featuring brand mascots, as well as live performance and episodic entertainment – all of which The Mill has created for well-known brands using this exciting new system.

Meet Mill Mascot here – and see the evolution to real-time character animation.