Sean Huxter - 3D Animator (Lightwave 3D)

These are two still frames from a trio of TV ads I created for Ad Vantage Productions. Our client was Bristol Communications, and in turn, their client was Newfoundland Telephone. It took less than two weeks to put together two of these 30 second ads, and another week and a bit to put together the third, which came along several months later. From the second they said "GO!" it was two weeks until the first two spots hit the airwaves. Created on an Amiga 3000 (with an 040 accelerator) and Rendered on two Amigas, with Lightwave 3.0, this was an amazing feat! So of course I used every shortcut in the book including repetitive motions, and short motion segments framed by stills. The nature of the ads allowed us to re-use a lot of the rendering, which made this whole series possible.

I first had to bring to life a character called the Feature Creature, who would introduce Newfoundland Telephone and New Brunswick Telephone's new *66 and *69 features. The only image I had to work with was one artist's sketch from their brochure. From that flat cartoon I created these little guys.

Then my job was to make them jump around on the screen telling users about the features. In one ad, I do a split screen with some live footage of a shower-head spraying water, but the other two are 100% computer animated. These ads got a great response, and there's talk of making T-shirts and other merchandise based on these critters. I got a fair amount of recognition for doing these ads.

The Feature Creatures - *69 ad was chosen as a finalist in the First Annual Wavey Awards sponsored by Newtek and Avid Media Group, in the category of Best Use of Lightwave in a TV Commercial. The drawing was August 9, 1995 but alas, the ad did not win. But to be chosen as one of four finalists was quite an honour. Newtek sent me a Lightwave hat. Thanks, guys!

These ads were also used by New Brunswick Telephone, and were identical, apart from the end logo, and the price of the features. So by using only a few replacement scenes, we were able to re-use the whole series of ads.

The .AVI file shows the *66 ad. It's also the New Brunswick Telephone version. The two ads are very similar, so you'll get a very good idea what made the judges choose this ad as a finalist. The .AVI file contains some artifacting due to the compression method, and the fact that it was transferred from video.

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