Proximo Spirits
Jose Cuervo Devil's Reserve — the label's devil brought to life, performed live through a webcam in Character Animator and voiced with AI
The devil on the Jose Cuervo Devil's Reserve label, rigged as a puppet and performed live — my own face, tracked over a webcam in Adobe Character Animator, driving the character in real time, with an ElevenLabs voice for its lines.
Devil’s Reserve is a Jose Cuervo tequila with a devil on the label — a woodcut-style illustration, frozen mid-dance in the agave. Proximo wanted him to move and talk for social. Instead of keyframing him, I cut the label art into a Character Animator puppet and performed him myself: my face, tracked live over a webcam, drove his head, eyes, brows and mouth in real time, and his lines came from an ElevenLabs voice built off the “Mad Scientist” preset.
Performance instead of animation. A puppet that reacts to a real face gets the small things right — the double-takes, the eyebrow, the pause before a line — that a keyframed character never quite does, and a take runs only as long as the performance. The rig kept the label’s texture intact, swapped hands for a shot glass or the bottle, and sat on the agave from the same artwork, so the character on screen is exactly the one on the shelf.
The devil, performed live
The clip at the top of the page is the scene export straight from Character Animator: one take, my face on the webcam, the devil on screen. Below, the in-situ tests that put him back among the bottles, and the webcam view with the face mesh and arm tracking that drove him.
The rig
One puppet, three hand swaps. The label illustration was separated into parts — head, brows, eyes, mouth shapes, arms, tail, the agave — and rebuilt so the webcam could drive the face while triggers swapped what he was holding.
Project Elements
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