Director Chris Delaney and designer John Delaney of Vancouver animation shop Delaney and Friends Productions have been compositing away over hot cels and digital data on Jackpot Super 7 tv commercials for Western Canada Lottery Corporation out of Calgary-based Parallel Strategies.

our challenge on this campaign was to come up with an animation style that would feature the mascot character ‘Jackpot the Cat’ presenting a bold, brassy new lottery game called Super 7. The spots had to have a rich, ‘in your face’ sort of look to reflect the big cash feel of the game.

We decided to stylistically bridge the gulf between classic cartoon character animation and 3D realism. We realized the best way to do this would be to create a totally 3D environment for the cartoon characters. What made this different from previous combinations of live action/animation or computer/character work was that we designed the computer 3D set to look as cartoony and wacky as possible, while rendering them as realistically as possible, thereby creating a totally 3D cartoon world.

It was decided the computer was the best way to achieve this as the sets and locations were so detailed and intricate that something like motion-control modeling would have been prohibitive. Also, the computer imagery was modeled to closely resemble conventional cartoon art direction in order to avoid a ‘separate’ look from the character. The character animation was then done by hand with the dynamic, appealing acting of traditional animation, thereby avoiding the floating, soft, timing typically associated with computer-generated characters.

We then composited the character animation using a Harry, and added soft shadows, reflections and body highlights to enhance the 3D feel and integration.

The resulting look has a heightened sense of cartoon three dimension. The Alias Imaging software program was used for the 3D backgrounds, with character animation done conventionally onto 35 mm film then steadi-gate transferred and mastered onto digital tape.