Features | |
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Last Airbender |
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Grey's Anatomy Promo VFX |
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Interview with Bobby Chiu |
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License to dream |
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Focus : Gears Of War 3 |
News Headlines | |
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Dragon Age 2 |
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Bioshock Infinite |
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Time travellers Comic |
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Envirometer |
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Thelma and Louise Remake |
Other Features | |
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Interview With Nick Harris |
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Making Art for Ipad |
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Making VFX for Ben Hur Remake |
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Interview : Mike winkelmann |
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Baby Data |
"Bunny Fusion”, directed by Pleix via Ogilvy Paris for Duracell. We asked a few questions to Pleix to lean more about this amazing project
Q : What was the brief from the agency?
A: The brief was wery simple and straight forward : Duracell is about to sell a new powerful battery ( the famous R6 (AA) everybody knows) and the agency (Ogilvy Paris) wanted something dynamic and playful, an orgy of cute bunnies forming powerful entities. The agency came up with a first storyboard. We helped them on the creative side by making an animatic to convince the client to make this film. Actually, our animatic overrated all the previous duracell animatics on the testing session, and the new look of the CG bunnies excited everybody, client included.
Q: Tell me about creating the bunnies - why a sumo, an elephant and a train?
A: The Duracell bunny character is already very well established so we had to stay pretty close to the original design. However, there is CG this time so we reinterpreted the old design making sure it could enjoy more flexibility than the original stop-motion puppet. We definitely aimed for a cut feeling, we wanted them soft and pink and we were excited about the visual aspect of that pink bunny crowd against a bright and minimal background. The sumo, elephant and train are power symbols requested by the agency since they were already working with them on some parallel duracell projects (print). We tested other entities, but finally we went with very classic power images; waterfall, sumo, elephant and high-speed train, so even a young kid could get.
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Q: what tools/software did you use?
A: We made almost everything on Autodesk 3DSMax (modelling, animation and rendering), with a few third party softwares (Thinking Particules and Vray). Thinking Particules was used to control the beahviour of thousands of bunnies going from one entity to another. It was very tricky to find the good way to make them move all togeather in a nice way: thousands of bunnies had to go from the waterfall to the tornado then to the sumo, and it was a real nightmare to fine tune and manage. Hopefully, thanks to really patient CG graphists, we succeed to get something more than OK.
Click on a thumbnail to enlarge
We encountered some technical difficulties on the tornado and the sumo because each bunny had its own animation cycle, and we got some memory overflows at some point...dozen of gigaytes of memory cache for each frame to deal with...but quickly fixed. Vray was used to render the film. The lighting is very simple, a diffused skylight and a dimmed sunlight to create some subtle shadows, and some CG fur on the closest bunnies. We tried to get the most simple background, and adding trees or clouds would load the readability down.
We used also RealFlow to create the waterfall swirl and some extra bunnies hanging to the giant sumo. The compositing on Autodesk Flame was quite simple (actually most of the shots were already pre-comped on shake), but the compatibility beween 3DSMax and Flame was precious to import CG camera paths in some complex shots. The most difficult challenge was to make something not too busy visually, fast but not too fast, to stay readable, design and minimalistic
Q: . What did you like about this job?
A: We felt like it was a really cool animation job with a great visual potential. Very dynamic and playful. Once Digital District solved most of the technical challenges, we were able to play a little with the edit and elaborate transitions between sequences, like "how do we go from waterfall to tornado to sumo". This was not an easy job since everything was supposed to work on a 30 sec film, the idea was to get something energetic and powerful but small events like the crowd loosing some rabbits were needed to produce a reasonable pace. Links
Thanks a lot Shannon for making this Q&A
Pleix