Monkey Business

About a year ago we worked on a baby food commercial. This job involved three things -making a baby carriage out of fruit, making a monkey out of fruit, and flying to Mexico City to animate them.

We were given a list of ingredients to use.

This is when I learned that you can't find everything in New York City. There are some tropical fruit that simply don't make it this far in December.


If your average Gristedes doesn't carry papaya in the middle of winter, what do you do? Your friend of 20 years who works for a fancy restaurant no help? Gray's Papaya has "papaya" in their name -maybe they'll sell you one!

Of course ask the Gray's Papaya worker for anything other than the $2 special and you'll be answered with a confused grunt and a thousand yard stare. Get the manager, who for some reason is unable to sell you the fruit unless it's smashed into a frothy beverage, to tell you where they get their supply and you'll tap into every piece exotic produce available on the North Atlantic Seaboard. That's why I'm OK at my job -things like that.


We worked up a few models with the material we could find. This let us plan for the shoot in Mexico.
Here's the final monkey. And the one made out of fruit, too (har, har).

With monkey is Abbey Luck who helped us out on the shoot and was the lead animator.