Duolingo -
Misunderstood

Social Spots
2025

We partnered with Duolingo on their Misunderstood campaign, creating three spots that land somewhere between adorable and mildly unsettling. Each one features cute but photoreal 3D sets and 2D characters, with everyone's favourite (?) owl finding himself in unfortunate situations.

The Smoothie Monster.

The first spot features Duo (affectionately nicknamed Guo here) as a swamp-thing-esque abomination following a catastrophic smoothie mishap.

We had a blast developing the look of the goo, exploring everything from 2D to 3D techniques before landing on the final art direction.

Hot Sauce.

Lastly, here's Duo eating deliciously hot tacos at Duo's actual real life taqueria. This is fine indeed.

Cute, but make it weird.

We wanted to pair the adorable low-framerate animation with rich tactile 3D worlds — think Animal Crossing meets dramatic stage lighting, with a sprinkle of nonsensical perspectives. Here are a few of our favorite 3D artifacts.

Executive Producer: Teresa Toews
Executive Creative Director: Jay Grandin
Creative Director: Eric Pautz
Head of Character Animation: Sitji Chou

Producer: Melissa Buisán
Creative Direction: Eric Pautz
3D Lead: Duncan Patterson
Character Lead: Sitji Chou
Design: Sophia Ouellette, James Noellert, Eric Pautz
3D: Duncan Patterson, Chris Moberg, Jane Guan, Josefina Llano
Audio: Bryan Pope