Duracell Professional
Mixed media corporate video
Rebranding the Duracell bunny
Duracell approached us with an exciting opportunity to help them develop a new ‘vision’ video to showcase their new products and tie in with the launch of the Duracell Professional brand. Because the products are for the B2B market we needed to make sure the bunny was a little bit more serious and professional to how we see him on consumer TV ads.
Planning the campaign
The idea behind the campaign was to show how the batteries could be used in real life scenarios, incorporating live action footage and CGI. We needed to create a storyboard with an in depth plan for each shot in order for us to be able to organise the live action shoot and begin animation on the detailed elements that would be needed.
A CGI update
The more sophisticated audience meant that the iconic Duracell bunny would need to be tweaked slightly. The existing Duracell Professional bunny was essentially a real life teddy bear with some photoshop retouching, which made animation difficult.
Computer generated fur
Once everyone was happy with our vision for the Duracell Professional bunny we were able to begin modelling him in 3D. The hardest part of this process was to create the CGI fur. The look and behaviour of fur is notoriously hard to simulate and we needed to create thousands of hairs individually for a truly realistic look. We achieved the fluffy look with the help of Yeti, fur generation software, which allowed us to create more realism and detail.
Mixing CGI with reality
The CGI items we would be creating needed to demonstrate how the batteries would actually be used and so would need to look natural in the live action footage. To help us achieve this we created cardboard rigs that would allow us to understand the perspective of the items we were creating digitally. For example we created a torch rig that the fireman could hold during the actual filming, we were then able to build the CGI torch and battery in exactly the right place in his hand.
Perfect results
Using a combination of live action footage with CGI gives us the best of both worlds. We are able to mix footage of people using the products in real life scenarios with idealised CGI batteries lit with ‘hero’ lighting.
