developing deer deborah

deborah becker approached me about creating a commercial for her state farm insurance business. i promptly agreed. it turns out that state farm requires their agents to stay within some rather strict guidelines when creating advertisements. one of the main rules is that the 30 second begins and ends with state farm supplied motion graphics; it's called a 'donut ad.' i had to stay in quite a few lines, but deborah wanted me to color as close to the lines as possible.

i pitched a few ideas and we narrowed it down to one. i then thought of something completely different, and she wanted to go with that (hopefully all future clients are this accepting). my concept was that we film the commercial that state farm wants, but rather than using a human, we use an extremely cute, but grumpy cartoon character. other than that, nothing is really special about the main character. it's just a guy who needs insurance... and it's good service that makes this cartoon magical.

next i needed to figure out what the heck this thing was. i played with some imaginary creatures, as well as some animal based things. i luckily(?) drove by a dead deer on the side of the highway one day and knew exactly what the cartoon will be. what's better than the cause of so many insurance claims? and how wonderful would it be to have a deer need insurance because it hit a human?

at this point the commercial went off as it would be expected to. i made storyboards for a 15 second and 60 second version (which i didn't make... yet). after deborah's approval, i moved to animatics, and then we actually filmed the thing. this process didn't take very long and didn't involve many issues.

the whole project was surprisingly uneventful. modeling, animating, and compositing the deer over the video footage was grueling, time consuming, and rather fun (for me, not my girlfriend). the only real issue i suppose would be the fact that deborah wanted me to do the narration. i narrated the animatic and she thought that it should stay my voice since i have such an "unusual tv voice" and the commercial would catch people's attention better. i suppose she has a point... but that's just a nice way of saying i have an ugly voice when heard over speakers. sad.

here's the animatic:

here's the final project:

creating a morning show

i created this animation a while ago, but i thought i would write a little blog about the creation of the project.

when i was interning at minnesota public radio, my boss and i were talking about my focus in animation and came up with a project for me to do. i think he was making me feel better about being unpaid... and it worked. i came up with the idea of short videos for each of the main djs a 89.3 the current (the best music station in the twin cities). the morning show was first.

i wanted to do something that was reminiscent to the old days of radio. i wanted to go back to when men were men and women served men. i found this to be a great juxtaposition to the actual on-air relationship of steve seel and jill riley.

like any good animation, i started with a script and a storyboard and then an animatic. originally, jill wanted her line to include the "f-word" but after the animatic, i think it was pretty obvious that we should keep it clean.

i voiced the narration in animatic, but man, i do not have a good voice for 50's animation. i needed an adult voice. luckily, my boss had just the voice. thank you michael wells.

here's the animatic. sorry about the swear mom.

nicaragua

they sure liked frisbees

i haven't made a blog post for a while. some of that is due to me being busy with summer school projects and now fall semester projects... but most of it is due to me spending two months in nicaragua. ashley and i lived in granada, teaching english at elementary schools and exploring the country. nicaragua gets a pretty bad reputation, and some of it may be true... but it's a pretty decent place full of really great people.

hitting the fan

the most ridiculous thing i did? my friend brody and i ran with bulls. we didn't really want to. we just wanted to watch... but there are no spectators in nicaragua. four bulls are released into the streets and no one is safe.