I consider myself a competent but frustrated character animator. I say frustrated on account of people’s bias of me as a technical person, I’ve too often been asked, instead, to rig characters. In this case, the characters of this commercial were completely in 2D, illustrated by Gareth Jensen, who also did a lot of the animation along with a few other animators.

The main difference was that the job was going to be done completely in After Effects, including the rigging. I’m not an AE rigger, nor have I animated a character in AE before. While I’ve seen what mind-boggling AE rigging tools can do, at the time of this commercial, I hadn’t seen any of them yet. So I basically had to do everything from scratch: learn Puppet Tools, create the workflow for swapping assets, expressions to switch drawings, etc.

Frankly, I don’t know if I want to do that again, given the powerful rigging tools available today. I think I’d prefer to animate.