This campaign was built around a real fan petition asking Olive Garden to bring back the braised beef tortellini. Olive Garden leaned into that grassroots energy for a national "bring it back" campaign that ran through NFL and NBA season broadcasts. Working from agency-provided reference and direction, we designed a brand-agnostic social UI system from scratch: emojis and comment containers meant to look like real customer hype and excitement for the dish, then animated and composited all of it into the live-action footage to blend CG and reality into one piece.

Technically, this was about doing the fundamentals at a broadcast level: tracking, compositing, and getting the UI to sit convincingly inside the shot. The frosted glass effect was the detail that mattered most, using it to blend and displace the footage underneath so the UI elements read as part of the world rather than pasted on top.

The shot we loved most was animating the 3D emojis themselves, giving them personality and reactions to the dish that helped sell the whole hype-drop feeling of the campaign.

This was full white-label ownership: design, animation, and CG were entirely ours, then handed off to the editorial team to integrate into the final cut.