General Insurance TV Spot

I animated a commercial! Now, these commercials were kind of notorious for having not very good animation so I tried really hard to inject some quality where I could. Unfortunately, The General was rigged in Biped which is just not a very good rig, so I did the best I could in the very short period of time I had. The studio wound up switching to motion capture shortly after this so I wouldn't wind up getting a chance to do another one.

Anyway, I did all the animation on The General except for the scenes with the bus. I watched and watched for it on TV but only ever saw the last 2 seconds once on SyFy The Sci-Fi Channel. A couple of my friends said they saw it though, and I believed them.

Check out the animation test after the jump.

In a lot of ways I actually like the way this test turned out better than the final commercial spot. I think the main reason for that was because I was able to work with the final audio for this shot from the beginning. On the commercial I had to first animate to temp audio with a temp voice actor and then swap in final audio later read by a different voice actor. I feel like I might have made different acting choices if I had known from the beginning how the final lines were going to be delivered. Still, in the end I was pretty happy with how the whole thing turned out given how short the turnaround was.