It’s your classic story of good versus evil, only the conflict takes place in a virtual refrigerator between a fresh box of Arm and Hammer baking soda and some foul-smelling onions and sardines.

The 15-second spot, ‘What Took You So Long’ out of Church & Dwight, was an ambitious project for Soho Post & Graphics, which was involved right from the get-go creating the characters and handling everything through the entire process.

The client was looking to retell a cel-animated spot from the ’70s about a tired old box of baking soda passing on the challenge of keeping the fridge odor-free to a fresh young box of a&h. Soho’s job was to heighten the production standards and bring the spot into the ’90s so that it would appeal to today’s ‘sophisticated viewer.’

Senior designer Brian DeVille began the two-month-plus process by developing the characters in pencil crayon to nail down the personalities and facial features that would say strong, confident and assertive for the new box, and expired, yet not defeated, for the old.

Using Alias Power Animator the task then was to translate the 2D drawings into a 3D realm. Once models were created, color, shadows and lighting were added as well as shapes and forms to delineate the hero’s teeth, jawline, eyes, gestures and posture.

Aside from the obvious plot line going on in the foreground, a quick look to the back of the fridge reveals several secondary plots talking place; the cruel onion intimidates an innocent stick of butter and a cute cupcake is taunted by some saucy sardines who zip themselves back into their can at the sight of the strong new box.

According to creative director Tony Cleave, considerable attention was paid to detail on all the characters. All the gestures and body language of the secondary characters were key-framed in Alias; no motion control was involved.

Once the movements were pinned down, the focus switched to the faces of the old and new boxes to match lip synch to voice-over, since they both have speaking roles. Complex mouth shapes were built within the Alias modeler.

With all of the characters’ personalities and movements in place, the next step was to give them a home – a shelf in a virtual fridge.

‘A lot of time and effort went into the imaging so that when you look at the shelf it’s frosted, the reflections are modeled and there is a lot of depth,’ says Cleave.

Instead of having one camera moving around inside the fridge, the setup was like a small film where each scene was created and edited together using depth of field and focus, which enabled the team to lose some of the hard-edge cgi look and create warmth with light and shadows on the models.

With so many characters, shadows, reflections and matte passes on the video of the fridge folk themselves, about 7,000 frames had to be rendered, which took a week with the post house’s six sgi’s running simultaneously.

Using the Henry V8, the thousands of frames were composited together, modified and rendered in position with final lighting and resolution.

And now with the job finished in the kitchen, Soho animators are heading out to the backyard for another cgi spot, for Treehouse tv, which again gives them the opportunity to storyboard and come up with the creative concept. For this job, children were shot on 35mm and will be placed in a cg world for preschoolers.

The Soho team on the a&h spot was made up of animators Derek Gebhart, Rob Wells and Andre Kun, and senior animator Titus Hora. Deborah Conway was producer, Lee Maund was the Henry Artist, Sandi Boyer was coordinator and Doug Morris was executive producer. Prisma Sound looked after the audio and Jim Murray at Onwords and Upwords was the copywriter.