(Our Virtual Influencer)
Making a digital character feel human is easy to say and nearly impossible to do. Cinder was born at We Are Social Singapore as a fusion of 3D innovation and real-time storytelling — but the creative challenge was never really technical. It was emotional. How do you give a virtual influencer a soul? How do you make an audience care about something made entirely of pixels?
Cinder,
Virtual InfluencerProject Date - 2021-2022
We started with the most human thing we could think of: the desire to be free. We gave Cinder a glitch-in-the-matrix moment — a self-aware reckoning where she realised what she was, and decided she wanted out. Her escape became the story.
A high-stakes 13-hour Twitch Subathon turned viewers into accomplices, watching and willing her jailbreak in real time. Behind the screen, state-of-the-art motion capture and depth sensors allowed a human actor to puppeteer Cinder live — giving her the kind of unrehearsed, spontaneous nuance that no pre-rendered animation could fake.
It worked! Cinder broke out. Her story culminated at SXSW 2023 in Austin, where she made her physical world debut — pixels stepping into reality. By blurring the line between game engine and lived experience, we proved that the distance between the metaverse and the real world is shorter than most brands think.
All it takes is the right story.
Behind-the-scenes of Cinder
