Yoplait Strawberry Banana (Yoplait 40 Flavors of Inspiration)

Back in February, I produced this piece for Yoplait as part of their "40 Flavors of Inspiration" series.


Credits:
Concept, Art & Animation by: Segun O. Mosuro
Agency: Aniboom / Saatchi & Saatchi
Client: Yoplait
Producer: Yonny Zafrani
Music: Apollo Symphony Orchestra, Joe Sacco


My initial pitch was heavily Greek influenced, the concept was "You'll feel like a goddess when you're eating Yoplait's Strawberry Banana flavor yogurt" (the target audience was women). The cast would include Cupid, and a young woman, named Lisa. The setting was a modern-day Greek garden, Lisa would interact with the garden after it is transformed into a strawberry-banana wonderland. Based on feedback from the client, I revised the concept; The Greek garden became a park with a gazebo, Cupid became a strawberry-banana fairy... The whole idea was pushed into a more "life is a party when you're eating Yoplait's Strawberry Banana flavor yogurt" direction.

A still from the piece. © Aniboom.

One of the ideas from my original pitch that remained intact was the transformation of the garden/park into a fruit-shaped landscape. The visuals of the fruit-shaped landscape, were inspired by the work of the amazing painter, Will Cotton (some of you may know him from his work on that California Gurls music video, and yes I'm aware he did lots of paintings long before that). That said I'm no Will Cotton, my final paintings are far from masterful.

I animated the characters and effects classically in Flash using a Wacom tablet, there is some motion tweening here and there but I generally couple it with classical Flash animation. The backgrounds were painted in Photoshop.

The animation is not as consistent as I'll like it to be, some scenes received way more attention than others, I ended up having to cut back on the quality of the animation and overall production value as the deadline approached. Drawing-wise, I had some problems keeping track of my volumes in Flash and clean-up was a long nightmarish process [using Flash's line tool]; I initially went for a thick to thin clean-up line, and very quickly abandoned that because of time restrictions. I was forced to reevaluate my approach to classical clean-up animation in Flash when the project was done.

In the future, I'll update this post with more behind the scenes work. Till then, enjoy this animation progression reel for one of the scenes in this piece: