Petplan TV Commercial

422 South Creates 3D Animated Characters For Petplan

422 South has recently completed animation for the new 60”, 50” and 10” Petplan TV commercials.

The National campaign, currently due to start it’s run end of April, features Pat the dog as our authoritative Vet and Pickles the cute, inquisitive cat who is always getting into scrapes.

Following extensive consumer research at the end of 2005, The Lighthouse Agency in Bath has developed a new brand identity for Petplan, the UK's largest pet insurance provider. The new identity will help maintain Petplan's position in the fiercely competitive pet insurance market. Lighthouse created the identity, building on Petplan's key brand values - honest, approachable and specialist. The two new characters (Pat and Pickles) were developed to represent these values and link Petplan's unrivalled knowledge of pets and their unique relationship with vets.

Lighthouse Creative Director, Andy Darwell briefed 422 South to come up with a 3D style of animation which would suit the nature of the Pet Plan product making use of the corporate blue (Pat’s nose) combined with the pastel colours of the textures and backgrounds.

422 Head Of Animation Grant Hewlett, lead a team of animators including Andy Bean and Nick Hales with Dan Lane (formerly Aardman Animations) as Animation Director. Proprietary rigging software was used to work within Maya and renderman 1.1 which helped with the clay look that the Agency were looking for. Proprietary deformation tools were used to speed up the rendering and ease the pain of the 10k stills renders that were required for print. In addition – 422’s in house web-based approval system - Worktribe was used for the client approval process.

Jo Dow provides the voice-over for all commercials.

422 producer for the animation is Debbie Taylor.

author: LE/DT
2006-05-08