Kia Australia Enlists Centaurs to Drive Awareness of “New Breed of Hybrid”

​Kia Australia’s latest campaign stars carefully-crafted centaurs to drive awareness for the auto brand’s “new breed of hybrid”.

​Innocean Australia and production partners FINCH and Alt.VFX obsessed over the details -- like where the human ended and horse began, how a horse gallops, and the way sweat catches the light -- and the lead actor was suspended in a harness for hours on end to ensure the final work was believable.

The film was directed by FINCH’s Nick Ball, and Colin Renshaw -- co-founder and CEO of Alt.VFX -- said the crew studied “every cinematic centaur we could find” to analyse their believability. The centaurs that failed to suspend disbelief all had the same issue: the ‘seam’ ruined the illusion.

So Colin ensured “the human stays human all the way past the navel, down to the pelvis, and the horse's chest and barrel begin where a person's hips would be” -- which looked far more natural than a “human waist perched on top of a horse’s neck”.

Then, they needed to consider the transition from skin to hair. “We decided the coat comes up over the skin, rather than the skin fading into coat,” Colin said. “An irregular, feathered edge, dark hair reaching up onto the flank, sitting higher at the sides than at the front. There is no line anywhere for the eye to lock onto.”

The sheen of sweat on human skin and the sheen of the horse’s coat had to harmonise and catch light the same way, and the lead actor, Erroll Shand, had to “perform a body he could not see and could not feel”. The Kiwi actor was suspended in the air for the shoot, harnessed at the waist.

Colin said, “His own legs are hanging in a harness, while the animal he is playing has four legs, a chest, a barrel and a rump extending well behind and below him. So we coached the movement: where the horse actually sits in space, how much room it takes up, how close he can get to the car or to another member of the pack without something passing through him, and how a body that heavy turns.”

The way a horse gallops is different than how a human runs too -- which is both obvious yet difficult to get just right. A gallop isn’t smooth, and capturing it as such reads as “man on a vehicle” versus ‘creature whose body “rises, drops, and rotates through every stride”’. And a person running swings their arms, but “a centaur's weight is carried on four legs, so the torso rides the gait rather than driving it, and the arms are free to do something else entirely.”

Accordingly, Colin explained, the rig had to “deliver the mechanics of the run cycle, the vertical travel and the beat of the footfall, while the vehicle underneath it was covering rough tussock country outside Queenstown and contributing its own motion, whether we wanted it or not.

“And it had to be safe and repeatable, take after take, in that wind and that cold.”

Creative director Darren Wright observed Erroll’s “animalistic” performance was critical for the post-production CGI work. “To be suspended in a rig, half naked, driven at speed, inches away from other cars in the freezing cold for up to eight hours a day was amazing,” he said.

“He’s in nearly every shot and his dedication to getting it right was phenomenal.”

Exclusively using CGI would have been easier, technically, but a real face, eyes, and “hair moving in the wind, in the real light of that landscape” brought the project to life, Colin added.

“It is the choice that cost us the most, and it is the reason the thing reads as a creature rather than an effect,” he said.

“Shooting in real country outside Queenstown rather than building the valley is part of the same instinct. If the light, the wind, and the ground are real, the creature has something honest to sit in.”

An earlier iteration of the idea, Darren said, “took place in a hybrid world, with every hybrid creature you could think of”.

He quipped, “But as we didn’t have the budget or timeline of ‘The Odyssey’, we simplified. Also, getting it down to one hybrid animal made the idea of ‘a new breed of hybrid’ so much more simple to tell.

“And the advantage of it being a centaur meant that the human half could express emotion and feeling, while the animal half could bring all the energy we needed for the chase scenes. So it was all a bit of a no brainer in the end.”

Kia is banking on the campaign improving salience for the “turbo-powered, alpha” Kia hybrids, and disrupting Toyota’s hybrid category domination.

“The challenge isn’t our product, or our distribution” Dean Norbiato, Kia’s general manager of marketing told LBB.

“While we saw a significant rise in our hybrid powered vehicles in 2026, there was still a lag in the mental availability afforded to our stable of hybrids. We needed to address that, immediately.”