• Ok, so you've heard the joke before: Evian is Naive spelled backwards. Well, I hadn't heard the joke when I modeled this. I always thought that people who buy water are naive. I come from a place where fresh water is in no short supply, so it seems foreign to me to buy it, especially when it tastes exactly like tap water (unlike Perier, which is naturally carbonated.) This frame is from an as-yet unanimated parody of the first Listerine "Plaque Fighter" ad. It is currently in the works, but on a back burner.

• My intention is to mimic the Listerine ad as closely as possible, but using my own objects and objectives.

• The bottle was created using a very basic lathe operation on a cross section that I drew using a real Evian bottle as a guide. The surface is clear, and highly refractive and reflective. The blue you see in the image is actually reflection, not refraction. There is nothing blue behind the bottle that could be refracting into the camera, but behind the camera is a cave opening, which is reflected in the bottle's surface.

• Although it isn't obvious in this picture, I've used a bump map on an oval surface as part of the bottle, near the neck, to make my signature initials visible in the bottle. Just like the little skier/letter e in the neck of an Evian bottle. In a full-fledged animation, this would be visible by the difference in reflection/refraction, but as I said, I only did this single frame, so it's hardly noticable.

• The label was drawn by me in Corel DRAW. I first did a drill function on the area of the bottle which would have the label, and named that surface label. Then I used the bitmap as a colour texture map. The bitmap wraps around the whole bottle, the back of which can be seen from the outside because the surface is double-sided.

• The sword and shield are basic shapes with surfaces that reflect the surroundings. The sword has "Sean Huxter: Animator" etched into its blade, and the shield has a rough bump-mapped texture, as if it were pounded many times by a dull instrument.

• The cave was simple, I just used a ball, roughed it up a bit with jitter, and cut an opening into its wall, which is behind the camera. I used a simple floor, and used a rocky bitmap as a diffuse map on a dark brown colour.

• Later I will be adding torches nailed to the rocky walls of the cave. They will be realistic flame, and will provide back-lighting for the animation.

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