Paramount Home Entertainment needed a breakthrough social activation to promote the home release of their film, Sherlock Gnomes. We brainstormed ideas and came upon this: what if we could bring an animated character to life in a way that has never been done before? We took on an ambitious project of live animating the smart-aleck sleuth to an interactive “Ask Sherlock Anything” Facebook Live event.

We partnered with Adobe to use the bleeding-edge Character Animator software to translate a physical actors expressions into a digital character through mo-mapping. To create our digital Sherlock, we painstakingly recreated our hero onto a templated 3D model. After we created our model, we had to find the right actor to play the part. We ultimately landed on an improv actor who had the perfect exaggerated facial expressions and quick wit to solve fans’s greatest mysteries. On the day of the event, our animator and actor went in front of the camera and began broadcasting. As the actor was fed questions and delivered witty responses, our animator synced character movements and appropriate gestures in real-time.

The Facebook Live Q&A was a tremendous success. We generated over 10,000 organic impressions and a retention rate of twenty seconds—six times the average retention rate. Most importantly, we delivered a ground-breaking digital activation that brought animation one step closer to the real-world.