Q&A on Jack Link's Living Sasquatch

The "Messin' With Sasquatch" campaign for Jack Link's Beef Jerky has provided comedic moments within commercial breaks for three years now. Brock Davis, group creative director at Carmichael Lynch, took the campaign further, having Sasquatch network on MySpace and Facebook, auction items at eBay, and write reviews on Amazon. Recently, Davis took the beast of comedy into webcam interactivity via LivingSasquatch.com, where fans were encouraged to capture webcam footage of themselves interacting with a 3D animated model of Sasquatch. Davis and LivingSasquatch.com Flash Developer Clint Hannaford of Boffswana discuss what it took to create the interactivity. For more on the Sasquatch project, visit Davis' Reel-Exchange profile at reel-exchange.com/members/aac62020/profile.

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How was the 3D Sasquatch built? How many different animations were created for the character?

Davis: We had a list of about 60 animations for Sasquatch, but in the end, edited it down to 35. Most of the animations were inspired by Sasquatch's movements and interactions featured in Jack Link's TV spots—we broke it down into three basic categories: emotions (five options), actions (23 options), and attacks (seven options). To create the animations, we filmed ourselves acting out the different movements until we had a good blueprint for the animators to follow.

Boffswana did the character designs using [Adobe] Photoshop and a Wacom tablet, and the 3D modeling, texturing, and rigging in [Autodesk] 3ds Max. The Flash development was with Flash CS3 and ActionScript 3 with realtime rendering in Flash 9 "plus"—a combination of a customized version of Papervision3D and proprietary character animation code, which is part of Boffswana's Flash-based Releas3D library. All the hosting is on [Amazon Web Services] S3 cloud servers.

What were the stumbling blocks in creating the various elements of user interaction and how did you overcome them?

Hannaford: Flash does not natively provide a way to record video, so we worked with the Carmichael Lynch team to implement a solution that involves embedding Sasquatch into an image stream that is encoded on the server side. Encoding a constant-frame-rate video of a fluctuating-frame-rate application provided a real challenge. There was no telling what frame rate the application would run at any given time, so encoding the video with a variable-frame-rate source meant we had to capture more than just the images to encode. [Blue Pacific] Turbine Video Engine SDK was used for the video compression.

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