Bookworm.(Visa International's advertising commercial)

A recent television commercial for Visa incorporates a unique digital process to create what appears to be a simplistic animation ... and one with a surprising twist.

The spot, called "Worm/Recycling," starts off quite unexpectedly, with white-line hand-drawn images of a retro-style boom box and a worm popping out of a hole. With the camera's close framing, it's unclear where this scene is taking place, though the lines through the top and middle of the screen and the gray-weave background suggest something vaguely familiar. Soon the worm begins to do the "pop and lock" dance moves to the '80s electronica that plays in the scene ... until a stork arrives and ends the fun.

About the same time, the camera pulls out, revealing that the scene is the product of a guy flipping through sketches he has made on his unused checks, flipbook style. The voiceover tells us that with Visa's online bill-paying method and check card, "You may never write a check again."

"Everyone has doodled on a napkin or in the margins of their address book, so we just took that concept a bit further by having a person multi-purposing the empty pages of his checkbook as a virtual sketch pad," says Brickyard VFX's Robert Sethi, co-lead on the project along with Yafei Wu.

To bring the effect to life, the artists referenced an actual checkbook, which was filmed on set, and modeled it in 3D using Autodesk's Maya 7. Then the group imported the 2D line art, which was sketched and animated by Patrick Smith of Blend Films. ...