Elimination Night commercial

Based on a script given to me by the project manager, I produced a 2.20 minute long animated commercial for a novel called Elimination Night.
The book is a roman à clef about the 'behind the scene' of American Idol (in this case renamed Project Icon). Because it was written anonymously, Amazon couldn't have the writer do the promo and decided to go for an animated mockumentary instead.

I was in charge of all steps of production, including storyboarding, character design, animation and editing as well as giving the client the video in various formats and compressions. The video was on rotation on TMZ website, prior to the launch of the book. It is now watchable on the Amazon page for the book ‘Elimination Night’ and in better resolution on my youtube channel:

So that is the final video but I thought I'd show you a few steps in the production process. Here was the first animatic I did. I was asked to do it before I got the soundtrack, so in order to get a rough idea of timing, I had to record the voices myself...

Once this was validated, I started to work on the characters. Here are a few shots of some 'wip' characters.

Joey, one of the judge was to be loosely based on the singer of Aerosmith.

JD, the other judge had to be an average Hip Hop/RnB guy.

 1st test of character with set.

Unfortunately I didn't document the process very well and I have no photos of the sets so that's all you get! 

Finally, here are just a few comparaisons of storyboard/shots.