If Mr. Ed were a donkey, and computer generated, and sold used cars…

Recently, together with my partners at BluFire Studios, I had the opportunity to work on a series of commercials for display before films in movie theaters as well as eventual TV broadcast.  The idea was to create a true “jackass” of a used car salesman- in this case quite literally, since he’s a humanized donkey.

Really poor customer service... Click to play

Donkey at work- Click to play

The project was a very fun challenge.  Our project manager, Ammon Jones, did a fantastic job of planning the shoot and managing the schedule and assets.  I handled the matchmoving or tracking (as needed for the shot), rotoscoping, and compositing.  I also took care of 3D translation and export, since the donkey was created by Mikhail Merkurieff in Maya and shaded, lit, and rendered by Matt Hoffman in Cinema4D.

For tracking, I used SynthEyes whenever there was sufficient movement to allow for a solid object matchmove.  I tracked based on points around the collar, since that’s where we were worried about the mesh matching properly.  In most shots, however, there was too little information to reliably use or even need a 3D matchmove, so instead I chose to work more quickly by stabilizing the shot in Monet.  Mikhail could then animate to stable footage and I would then reapply the tracking information to the final render while setting up the composite.  It worked perfectly, and saved us a ton of time.

I’ve only included two shots as samples of three commercials with 11 total shots.