We Turned Cate Blanchett Into a Singing Tiger

There are moments in this industry where you step back and think — we actually made that. Standing in the Kino International watching Euphoria with an audience, this was one of those moments.

Julian Rosefeldt's Euphoria is not a quiet film. It is bold, surreal, and unashamedly ambitious - a cinematic installation that wrestles with capitalism, desire, excess, and the systems that shape the way we live. It puts remarkable performers in extraordinary situations and asks them to carry enormous ideas with their bodies and voices. The result is something that has to be seen to be believed.

And somewhere inside that film, there is a tiger. A tiger that sings. A tiger that is, unmistakably, Cate Blanchett.

How We Built the Tiger

Our team at Mimic Productions was brought in to handle the facial motion capture, rigging, and animation for this scene. The brief was clear in its creative ambition and demanding in its technical execution: take Cate Blanchett's live performance, every flicker of expression, every nuance of her voice and face, and transfer it faithfully into a photorealistic digital tiger.

We used our proprietary facial capture pipeline to track her performance in precise detail - not just the broad strokes, but the micro-movements that carry emotion. From there, our rigging team built a custom facial rig for the tiger, designed from the ground up to respond to the captured data without losing the feline anatomy that made the character believable. Then animation took over, using the rig and the data together to bring the performance to life.

The goal was never to create a digital animal. The goal was to preserve a human performance inside one - and have audiences feel both at the same time.

We worked closely with Syreal Entertainment throughout, ensuring every creative decision stayed true to Julian's vision for the scene. The surrealism of the film depends on the tiger feeling completely real while also clearly carrying a human soul. That tension - between the feral and the familiar - had to be present in every frame.

Seeing It in the Room

Attending the screening at Kino International was something special in its own right. The venue itself carries weight - a landmark of 1960s GDR architecture that recently reopened in Berlin,. There is something fitting about screening a film this bold in a space with that much history.

After the screening, the full team came on stage - performers, crew, creative collaborators - against rolling end credits that included David Bennett - Mimic Productions GmbH. Seeing our names up there alongside Giancarlo Esposito, Cate Blanchett, and everyone who made this production possible was a genuine privilege.

This is what the work is for. Not just the technical precision or the pipeline efficiency, but the moment when it lands in front of an audience and does something to them. Euphoria did something to that room. And we were part of making that happen.

Grateful to Julian Rosefeldt and the whole production for trusting us with such an extraordinary piece of character work. Proud of everyone at Mimic who poured their craft into it.