Animal Instinct creates Spaghetti Western commercial featuring Penguin hombre.

After introducing the Penguins’ Rock exhibit for the Tennessee Aquarium, our objective was to continue to promote the new penguin exhibit – but reinforce that there were other exhibits to see at the Tennessee Aquarium.

So we came up with the idea of a penguin being the “new guy” in town as depicted in Spaghetti Westerns. He’d be the new hombre being sized up by everyone he sees as he entered the Aquarium and went from exhibit to exhibit.

Since these penguins were arctic weather birds, they weren’t going to be parading through the Aquarium. That meant we had to shoot them against a blue screen and digitally place them in front of each exhibit. One of the benefits of this is that we now have blue screen footage of Gentoo and Macaroni Penguins and can place them into nearly any background or scene.

Jay Petach of Sound Images wrote and recorded the score – “A Fistful of Spaghetti.” We had a recording session where we added horns to his original track and Jay, recording engineer Matt Hueneman and Greg sang the chorus of cowboy chants in the background. It was hard to keep a straight face with three guys sitting around a microphone singing what amounted to rhythmic grunts. In tune, no less.

Mark Cretcher of CommandX did an amazing job of placing our little guy in the surroundings. He poured through all of the footage and matched angles and perspectives and added the fine touches like shadows to make it look as realistic as possible.

“Spaghetti Western” for Tennessee Aquarium

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