I worked on this as a freelancer, and it was quite a frantic job. There were so many elements and if a cg forensic psychologist would examine the Maya scenes, they would find that loads of textual clues of how stressful this commercial was.

For all its unbearably fast pace editing and doubtful composition choices, the final renders didn’t look half-bad at all. Of course, I must say that I didn’t contribute to the rendering. :)

My contribution, in fact, was, again, the rigging of the characters; they were actually flat characters (to depict a 2d look), and I rigged them accordingly, which was a crazy thing, actually. I didn’t have a say in the matter, of course. The red bear protagonist was only partly 2d: he had some thickness.

I got a chance to animate some of the characters, like the villainous evil purple guy and the spectators on the stand. But, once again, in the spirit of this thread, to make known what is normally hidden away from the those who view this, my contribution extended far beyond what was nominally given to me. For most of the time, character animation (not limited to this job, of course) had been revised by me, though I couldn’t take credit for it officially because I hadn’t originally been assigned to do it, nor could say it had been mine unless I nixed the original completely, which hardly ever happens. It happens not only in animation, but in every aspect of the job: shading, modelling, rendering, setup, rigging, and even compositing.

Perhaps that’s why it feels much bigger in my mind than what the credits say: to have personally struggled against a stubborn scene that was placed on my lap, and thus produce the grain that otherwise wouldn’t have been produced, impresses upon me the importance of looking beyond the obvious.