In this charming animated spot, we explore the sad truth of what it’s like to be a tomato in today’s America. That is, if you’re not a NatureSweet brand tomato. The spot, titled "Stop the Abuse," features a psychologically scarred assortment of tomatoes in a group therapy session, sharing their horror stories of being squeezed, prodded, and poked. The scene is ripe with emotion.

We developed a proprietary animation process and pipeline to create realistic facial expressions and performances for the tomato characters. We used 3dsMax to animate the tomatoes, but no motion capture was used. It was done the old-fashioned way: lots of keyframing done by really good animators. Photoshop, Mudbox and V-ray were used to render the realistic textures and all compositing was completed in After Effects.

To further enhance the reality of the character animation, we captured the voice actors’ performances on video during the recording session, so that they could later use their actual facial expressions as reference for the tomato characters.