When our friends at Arnold came to us with the fun idea of making an “endless couch” commercial promoting CenturyLink’s Prism TV package, we fell in love with the concept. Simple whimsy at its best, the animated spot takes us down an endlessly long green couch populated by characters that come and go with the fast-moving narrative soundtrack.

With the appearance of our host family (mom, dad, daughter and pup) we move merrily along, meeting all of the characters families will be able to access with Prism TV.  Suited-up athletes, newscasters and cameramen appear as the narrator talks about pro and college sports, local and national news.  Moving on to reality shows and Hollywood movies, the couch acquires a film set’s worth of actors, make-up artists, and a red-beret-wearing director.

With the mention of interactive features, action-movie figures take a seat on the sofa next to an unlikely trio of fly-fisherman, chef and anemic looking vampire–with Bigfoot striding behind. And promoting the package’s surf, stream and online play perks, we meet a rainbow-maned unicorn, YouTube troubadour, chatroom pals and online shoppers.

In short?  there was no relaxing on this couch.  We populated it with more than 50 characters. And using some inverse kinematics scripts in After Effects, we were able to create great, lifelike movements for all of them. When it was time for this job to ship out, we kinda wished it had been endless: Who doesn’t love animating unicorns, robots and zombies all day?

This was an immersive dive into creating fully animated, character-driven commercials, and what a dive it turned out to be! The fun didn’t stop with a series of couch commercials. Our beloved characters played starring roles in other social content, OLV’s and how-to videos.