A 17-second animated spec ad for Tile, the Bluetooth trackers you clip to the things you lose. It's the first of my animations with a couple and dialogue. The idea is the oldest joke in any home: one person loses the keys, the other always knows where they are. Until the roles swap. He tears the flat apart, she rings his keys from the sofa without getting up, and they turn out to be in the fridge. Seconds later, she can't find her phone.

What I did

I kept to what Tile says the trackers do: ring them from the app, and press one twice to ring your phone. Then I built the couple as opposites, so the joke reads before anyone speaks: Theo, tall and lanky, in a blazer with one shoe on, and Lou, short and round, curled up on the sofa in a fuzzy cardigan. Each got a character sheet with an expression strip. Then one open-plan flat in a single wide shot, so the sofa, the fridge and the door share one space, and a close-up of the fridge with the keys next to the butter. Nine shots, five short lines, and a callback for the punchline: "I put them somewhere safe." The last shot is only the product.

What I changed

The first version had no dialogue. Five short lines made the timing land. Lou was redrawn twice, the last time from a reference I liked, rounder and calmer. The product became the Tile Pro. Then the first generation multiplied things: two phones, a fridge that grew a second door, trackers on the sofa, the keys found where the phone should be. One rule fixed most of it: an exact count for every prop, each with its own reference. I rebuilt only the broken shots.

What I learned

Give every small prop its own reference, or the model will duplicate it. Write the number of objects as a rule, not a description. And a callback line is the cheapest punchline there is.