Cuppa Coffee has created four spots for Lifetime Television’s Valentine’s contest "Romanced Across America Sweepstakes." Incorporating stop-motion animation and digital compositing, co-directors Warren Brown and Hector Herrera designed four different "panels" to illustrate the journey that Lifetime is sending their lucky winners on. These panels for Santa Fe, Vermont, Florida and Washington are comprised of photographs, moving illustrations and stop-motion props that were shot under camera and then digitally collaged into frame.

Rhinoceros Visual Effects & Design has brightened up six 15-second spots introducing Colgate Total Whitening toothpaste. "Hearts" shows a toothpaste tube floating in a red space until heart-shaped balloons peel away from the background and float skyward revealing the new package in a stunning white environment. "Brightness" opens with the tube on the same red background, when a brightness adjustment bar pops up, goes haywire and turns the background again to white. These first two spots launched in the beginning of February with the others set to roll out in the upcoming months.

Spontaneous Combustion helped bite off the heads of Pepperidge Farms' Goldfish for a new ad campaign. Filmed by New York-based Chelsea Pictures, the campaign consists of one 30-second, a 20-second with a 10-second endtag, and a 15-second ad. The spot begins with CG goldfish swimming and diving through a page of sheet music. As the fish start to swim throughout the room, live-action footage of kids and mothers munching on goldfish fill the scene.

ILM created the new Super Bowl spot for Budweiser that has aliens saying, "Whassup!" The spot opens with a dog walking into a country field and is then beamed up into an alien spacecraft. After the head alien asks the dog what he has learned on Earth, the dog unzips and out pops an alien who yells, "Whassup!" The animation was done using Softimage with facial and lip-synchs done with ILM's in-house software Caricature. Modeling was done in Maya and Alias|Wavefront, with rendering handled in RenderMan and compositing in ILM's in-house software CompTime.

With Chuck Gammage Animation handling the traditional animation and TOPIX/Mad Dog taking on the 3D, a new spot for Kellogg's Island Adventure campaign in the U.K. has Uder the Cow bringing excitement to breakfast. The spot introduces Kellogg's new Corn Flakes Cereal and Chocolate Milk Bars. In the 2D spot, Uder armed with a chocolate milk gun takes aim at boxes of Corn Flakes falling from the sky, turning them into Corn Flakes Cereal and Chocolate Milk Bars. Director Chuck Gammage oversaw the production of the entire spot.

SimEx Digital Studios has wrapped on a new Kellogg's Froot Loop spot, which launches Toucan Sam and his mischievous nephews into space. SimEx provided 2D and 3D animation, compositing, editing, as well as live-action shots for the 30-second commercial. "Rocket" has Toucan Sam and his three nephews propelling themselves into space in a primitive looking rocket. Shane Zalvin, Roberto Casale and Holger Leihe created the cel animation, with help from cel assistant directors Charlotte DeBlock and Ingin Kim. Digital ink and paint was completed at SimEx using the Toonz system.

In celebration of Valentine's Day, Wild Brain has created a new spot for Hershey's, which has the famous Kisses candies blushing. Directed by Carl Willat, the commercial features two silver wrapped Hershey's Kisses as one kisses the other, its wrapper turns red and their tags embrace. The spot was animated in Softimage and rendered in Mental Ray with compositing done in Henry.

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Courtesy of J.J. Sedelmaier Productions

Miss Jones, a design and visual effects commercial company, has created an animated spider for AT&T's new media campaign. In the commercial, a spider weaves a web, which represents the AT&T logo. This spot continues in the same vein as other AT&T spots, "Pop," "Newton" and "Balloon," completed by Miss Jones. Miss Jones' spot director Barnaby Jackson said, "With the other spots we start with the [AT&T] logo, and then transformed it. Here, we recreated the logo. We really let the spider have artistic license.

LocoMotion Studios, an Austin, Texas-based motion-capture service bureau, recently completed the Corona commercial "Perico" using the award-winning Vicon 8 optical motion-capture system. This 30-second commercial, created for Atomic Pictures in San Antonio, Texas, features several characters who emerge from water drops off the sides of a bottle of Corona and a keg of beer to create a festive environment that recreates a bar at a tropical resort. All of the dancing and acrobatic moves were captured using a 10-camera Vicon 8 motion-capture system.