Reverse engineered animatics

Reverse engineered animatics are animatics that are created from existing TV commercials that have already been produced and may even be currently on air. Now, the first thing you probably want to know is, why would someone want to create an animatic from a commercial that has already been produced? Most commonly, spots are reverse engineered for the same reason that any animatic is created - for testing purposes.

Apples to apples. When agencies test new ideas in the form of animatics, they often like to test them against existing commercials. Test audiences can respond to a finished commercial in a different way than a commercial that has only been animated in an animatic form. To level the playing field between the full up commercial and the animatic, we re-create the existing commercial as an animatic. When a test audience sees both ideas, they both have similar production values, and the finished spot does not have an advantage over the animatic.

Sometimes, agencies like to test a competitor’s existing commercial against their new ideas for a commercial. Here again, they want to level the playing field and make sure their new idea has every chance to compete against their competition’s spot.


Left: original commercial, produced for Emergen-C, as it aired. Right: reverse engineered animatic.



There are two main factors to consider when reverse engineering an animatic. The first is to match the level of production quality of the reverse engineered animatic to the level of the new animatics that will be tested along with it. In the case of the Emergen-C reverse engineered spot above, it was going to be tested along side other animatics for the product that had new ideas. The new animatics were medium-tier, so we had to make sure the production value of the reverse engineered animatics was no better and no worse.



Left: original commercial, produced for John Hancock, as it aired. Right: reverse engineered animatic.


The second factor to consider is selecting the elements from the finished commercial that will need to be carried over to the animatic. For example, in the case of the Hancock commercial, the various positions of the man’s head helped get his feelings across. The finished commercial is wide on the man throughout and did not use close up shots. The spot relied on his head posture to help tell the story, so the animatic had to do the same. We accomplished this by drawing several heads with corresponding facial expressions to match the finished commercial. It was also important to carry over the design of the text message interface from the original commercial to the animatic. We recreated the look of what was done in the commercial. Since the concept of the spot relied heavily on the legibility of the text copy, we had to make a few tweaks to make the text more legible.
When reverse engineering, it's important to be sure that the animatic gets the idea of the commercial across as efficiently as the actual spot does. If it's over or under-produced, the animatic could end up in a different production class from the original spot. If the finished commercial is misrepresented, the testing results will not be accurate.

At first glance, reverse engineering a commercial may seem simple. It is actually a very delicate process. But just like any animatic production, getting the idea across is job one.

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