D&AD’s 2026 AI & Creativity Report: Human Judgement Remains the Creative Advantage
August 18, 2026
Berlin director/producer duo Stanko Stupar and Dunja Krasic (aka Crumb) make their Stash debut with a refreshing CG take on a spec fintech spot starring a tiny plastic surfer riding waves of glittering cash.
Dunja Krasic: A lot of us don’t really understand money, and because of that, a lot of us take a happy-go-lucky approach to it. What’s a better cliché for happy-go-lucky than a surfer?
To make the most of the character’s single painted facial expression, we built very detailed textures in Substance 3D and relied on Redshift’s fast displacement to bring them out in macro shots. We layered this with careful edit choices and body movement, so in the final shot the same figure with the same expression would feel different.
“The obvious challenge was technical: simulating thousands of rigid coins in an organic, flowing way.”
Rigging was another challenge. Initially we wanted a fully rigid character with zero secondary movement, but mid-project we decided to introduce subtle movements to reflect his change.
The obvious challenge was technical: simulating thousands of rigid coins in an organic, flowing way. Instead of pushing for high fidelity in collisions, we split the coins into two buckets.
Only the falling ones were simulated. The ones under the character follow a pre-animated wave structure, with randomized positions and rotations, and we leaned heavily on motion blur to sell the look. Renders were slow, and some scenes crashed out of spite.
Production: Crumb
CD: Stanko Stupar
Producer: Dunja Krasic
Character Modeler: Dusko Bjeljac
Rigging: Russ Etheridge
Animator: Marko Milosevic, Stanko Stupar, Stevan Djakovic
Designer: Miriam Jacobi
Rendering: Christoph Strohfeld, Boris Bogosavljevic
Music/sound design: Giovanni Dubini
Toolkit: Cinema 4D, Redshift, Adobe CC, Substance 3D, ZBrush
