We’d already done 3 Cocopops adverts by the time hippos came along. An idea from the Ad Agency, I only came into the project late on, having been busy on other work. I was given the task of creating the steam and the chocolate dissipation in Renderman for Maya, and all the final compositing.

Steve Tappin storyboarded, Andy Turner animated, Rich Wright built, textured and shaded the characters, Craig Clark modelled and textured the environment, Tim Brown modelled, sculpted and textured the Cocopops, Rich Bentley rigged and skinned the characters , wrote all the scripts for the bubble effects and as usual got everything to work.

The original story was of 5 hippo washer women washing the Cocopops in hot milk to make the milk go chocolaty faster. It got changed to 3 hippos for space reasons and right near the end we were asked to take out all interaction between the hippos and the Cocopops.

Here’s a nice scalable version of the one we supplied.