One of the most unusual personalities on television is "The Box": a walking, talking cardboard box representing the Progressive Corporation. It has been involved in all sorts of amusing scenarios, but in its latest appearance, we discover that The Box can sing. Who would have thought?

The Hershey's Kisses commercials have been a popular and highly successful campaign, originally created using stop-motion animation in the 1990s and continuing to the present day with computer-generated imagery. The now-defunct Colossal Pictures in San Francisco produced the earliest versions of these advertisements, which were brilliantly directed by Carl Willat. In 1995, Colossal, unable to find a local stop-motion animator who could handle their current Hershey's assignments,reached out to me. I was persuaded to travel from my home in Santa Monica to their San Francisco studio to animate two commercials: one featuring ice-skating Kisses and the other spotlighting a snake-charming Kiss. Both commercials were extremely challenging to create, but the final results were incredible.

In the 16th century, Italian painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo created portraits of people that were wonderfully weird, constructed from food, plants, animals, and household objects. Four hundred years later, in the 1980s, wine coolers arrived and became a craze in the United States. It might seem that these two events, unrelated and centuries apart, have nothing in common; however, in 1988, I was commissioned to bring an Arcimboldo-inspired character to life for a California Cooler advertisement by a company called Limelight. Producer Prudence Fenton and director Stephen R. Johnson sent me on a mission: to construct a man made of fruit and animate him via stop-motion. A daunting task indeed!

This unusual commercial, titled Moving Life Savers, featured hundreds of real Life Savers candies in action. In 1989, I was hired by Limelight, a now-defunct production company, to bring those candies to life via stop-motion animation. The project was a significant challenge, particularly because the desired result required controlling a large number of candies using the very limited "old-school" technology of the time.

One of the cleverest ad campaigns I've been involved with was for Black Star Beer in 1992. A "Make-Believe History" was created for the newly launched brewery by the Wieden & Kennedy agency, directed by Alex Proyas. The ad featured a montage of faux commercials from the past, narrated by announcer John Corbett (of Northern Exposure fame). My contribution was to animate Zippy the Cap, an iconic talking bottle cap character supposedly from 1950.

One of the most ambitious stop-motion commercials of all time was created in 1991 for Mickey's Parade Frozen Treats, directed by Kevin Dole. The advertisement featured hundreds of animated puppets and props, requiring clever techniques to bring them to life.

Since his debut in the mid-1960s, the Pillsbury Doughboy was brought to life through stop-motion animation. However, in 1992, it was decided to switch to CGI. It was my pleasure to animate the Doughboy for his final stop-motion commercial campaign at Apogee Inc. for the Leo Burnett advertising agency. A couple of commercials were produced simultaneously under the direction of effects legend John Dykstra, and I was chosen to animate one with a Christmas theme. The project budget was clearly high, as they offered me more than my standard pay rate. Naturally, they expected the highest quality animation in return. I was given a luxurious amount of time to conduct tests and experiment with the character's performance, which was far from the norm for a typical stop-motion shoot.