My first 3D TV spot for Carvago, and what broadcast taught me

I made the 2025 Carvago TV spot, a 3D animated commercial that aired on ČT Sport in the breaks between matches during the 2026 Winter Olympics. This post is a behind-the-scenes look at the project: the broadcast constraints, the color and light work, and an honest take on what AI can and can't do here. The spot also appeared online as part of a collaboration with Heureka, where my animation was nested inside a longer cut.

First time on a TV deadline

This was my first project made for broadcast, and it came with a learning curve on production details I had never had to care about before. Most of my prior work was for the web or as standalone renders, where a few extra frames or seconds are meaningless. For a TV slot, the duration is absolute. The spot had to be timed to the exact frame to fit into the surrounding cut, and the frame rate had to be precise. It was a completely new set of technical constraints. This forced a different kind of discipline from the very beginning, where the final export timing influenced decisions made weeks earlier. It's a detail you don't think about until you have to deliver it.

Color and light do the heavy lifting

To be transparent, the car models were purchased assets. My work was composition, color, lighting, animation, the 2D visual layer, and the final cut. I'm a car enthusiast, so for the color picking, I went through real manufacturer paint palettes and chose the prettiest, most plausible colors. The idea was to make them feel like cars you could actually see on the road. The main technical anchor was the lighting. Making every car in a shared scene look its best under one set of lights is a delicate balance. The pipeline was: Figma for storyboard concepts and 2D assets, Blender for the 3D animation, After Effects for the UI overlay with the on-screen prices, and Premiere Pro for assembling the rendered PNG sequences from Blender into the final cut alongside the voiceover. The brief had some pushback at points and I had to compromise, but the final result still has my look.

On AI

I use AI tools and I like them. The voiceover in this spot came from ElevenLabs, and AI accelerates plenty of my other work too. But a finished broadcast piece isn't a single asset, it's a chain of decisions: lighting the scene, timing the animation to a specific feeling, fitting the whole thing to a frame-exact slot in a longer cut. Those calls still need a person who's been staring at cars and car commercials long enough to know what reads. AI is a great tool in the toolbox; it's not yet sitting in the driver's seat. If you need a spot like this for your own project, email me at [email protected].

The full spot is embedded above if you want to see how it all came together.