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: