Ecobee: Your Home Tells a Story
Elastic X Feed Me Light
Ecobee
Denis Bouyer
Pauline Heuillard
Ben Leyland
Henry Kent
Kiri Haggart
Eve Kornblum
Kate Berry & Paul Makowski
Jillian Lynes
Nick Faidley
Jake Savage
Simon Duclos
Thomas John
Saskya Olsen, Axel Maillot, Revil M. Andrade, Lara Pickle
Eduardo Souza, Gabriel Oliveira
Merlin Perry
Thibaud Clergue, Jean Guillaume Culot
Jonatas Ribeiro
Julien Becquer
Dean Boadana-Krone
a52 / Elastic
Alex Villabon
Gizmo Rivera, Adam Flynn, Matthew Monteleone
When Elastic invited us to collaborate on Ecobee’s latest spot, the brief called for a look that was classic, elegant, and steeped in tradition. The expectation was pure 2D animation, but we proposed something a little different: a fusion of 3D and 2D that would retain all the charm of traditional illustration, while adding depth and nuance.
At the heart of the piece was the wallpaper, a nod to the French Toile de Jouy, a decorative style known for its delicate, single-colour illustrations set against an off-white background. Traditionally found on fine fabrics and wallpapers, Toile scenes often depict pastoral moments, picnics by a lake, meandering florals, timeless countryside vignettes. For Ecobee, we reimagined that tradition with a modern twist: a contemporary, stylish woman arriving home, hanging up her coat, then wandering into the kitchen only to spot on her Ecobee thermostat a “porch pirate” making off with a package from her front step. She bursts out of the house and chases him away, a playful moment of heroism captured in the delicate lines of the illustrated world.
To bring this to life, we hand-drew every inch of the wallpaper environment in that Toile style, then developed a custom Blender shader so our 3D elements could sit naturally within the stepped rhythm of 2D animation. The central character designed to match the likeness of the live-action actress carried the look effortlessly, moving with the charming snap of traditional hand-crafted animation.
In the final reveal, we pull back to show that this illustrated drama exists within a real, modern home and that the woman in the wallpaper is the same woman standing in her kitchen in the live-action world. Working closely with Elastic, we integrated these two realities seamlessly, creating a spot that feels like it could have been lifted from an elegant 18th-century print, yet moves, breathes, and lives firmly in the present.
